


A Song to See in the Dawn

by Werelibrarian



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Marvel 1602
Genre: Alternate Universe - Elizabethan Era, Boats and Ships, European trade routes, M/M, Period Atypical Ecumenism, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-02-15 11:52:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 36,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13030494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Werelibrarian/pseuds/Werelibrarian
Summary: The long years Foggy had waited, some days he felt they had pulled his heart out of shape and all his love, his hopes, his promises were mangled, imperfect things that were not nearly fine enough to give away. But the boy he had fallen in love with at the age of twelve was here, looking strong and beautiful and so willing that it made Foggy’s chest hurt, and it was time to make a gift of himself, no matter how damaged he was by age and salt water.





	1. Chapter 1

Caulfat Nelson looked into his tankard. Ale. Good strong South Bank ale. He twisted the edge of the vessel around on the rough wood table—it made a quiet sound—and glanced timidly at the two sailors pouring the golden stuff down their throats.

“What ails you, boy? Is it gone bad?” one of the sailors asked, pushing his hawk-like nose towards Caulfat. “I’ll drink it if you like it not.”

“No, Master Duncan,” he piped. Duncan had been the one to put the ale in front of Caulfat, and as the newest sailor on the Mariah he couldn't afford to sour his shipmates with ingratitude. He lifted the tankard to his mouth and drank. Then his eyes bulged and he spat out the mouthful onto the ground. “Ugh, tastes like piss!”

The two other sailors pounded each other on the back. They were laughing too hard to speak, but the way they gestured at the front of their breeches made Caulfat push the tankard of urinous ale away and spit on the ground again.

A gravelly voice cut through the laughter and a slim hand landed on Caulfat’s shoulder. “If you poison the boy, Duncan, the Captain will be pleased not at all that he has to find a new bucket boy.”

“Master Gaiman.” The men sat up straighter. The Mariah’s first mate was a mild, quiet man with glistening eyes that missed nothing and a voice that could out-howl a windstorm, though he seemed to have no belly to keep it in. “No harm was meant.”

“Aye, tis never meant, but done anyway. This is the sailor’s life, boy—piss in a cup and mates that’ll laugh when you drink. Would not you prefer to stay on land?”

“No, Master Gaiman,” Caulfat shook his head so hard his belly—the part of his generous anatomy that gained him his name—wobbled.

“Is your father alive, boy?” Master Gaiman threw his leg over the bench and waved at the tavern keeper for a drink.

“Yes, Master Gaiman.”

“What sort of man is he?”

“He is a butcher, sir.” That was also where Caulfat had gotten his name.

Master Gaiman and the sailors all made noises of sympathy. Butchers worked day in day out, up to the knees in animal carcasses and they lived short, hard, stinking lives. Caulfat’s father had ordered him to find another profession the day a steer’s corpse had crushed one of the apprentices to death.

“Spare a groat, my good masters, can ye spare a groat?” A tiny voice asked and a tiny hand, open palm up, appeared at Master Gaiman’s elbow.

It was a boy with hair the colour of rust. He held a stick that he tapped along the floor, and his filthy shirt gaped open to show a belly that sunk in under his ribs. He wore a ragged strip of linen tied over his eyes and beneath it, he looked naught older than ten, but the pitch of his tremulous, lilting voice placed him closer to Caulfat’s age—twelve.

“Be off, you bloody Irish whelp.” Duncan aimed a cuff at the boy’s head. “Show your filthy palm in some other tavern.” The boy tried to duck, but he was too slow and Duncan's meaty knuckles glanced off the crown of his head. A cloud of dust flew up around Duncan’s hand.

The urchin fell against Caulfat’s chest and clung, one hand outstretched against more blows that he would not be able to fend off.

“Masters!” Caulfat yelled, wrapping an arm around the skinny boy and shouldering between him and Duncan. “Some mercy for a poor beggar, surely with all that you’re spending tonight, you can spare that too.”

“You dare yap at us, little one?” One of the sailors stood menacingly. “Forget not that you're ours for the length of the trip, Caulfat.”

“Sit down, Master James,” Master Gaiman snapped. “Young Master Nelson, take your new friend and feed him.” He flipped a coin at Caulfat, who caught it, tugged the brim of his cap at the first mate, and wrapped his fingers around the boy’s skeletal wrist.

“Come along, lad,” he muttered, towing the beggar boy away.

“Oi, sir, where are you taking me?”

“Hush.” He waved the coin at one of the girls who served in the tavern. “Mistress, will you bring us some food?” He looked the dirt-crusted boy up and down. “And a bowl of water, please, mistress.”

“You’re not me father, you’ll not be bathing me.” The boy snarled, pulling his hand away. His hands were fists held stiffly at his sides, as if anger and frustration at his own inability to fight were warring inside his very bones.

“I wasn't planning to,” Caulfat retorted as a serving girl put down two boiled onions and two hunks of bread, and two small-beers. A second girl put a bowl of water in front of the boy. It was warm and had a soft-looking rag in it. Caulfat smiled up at her for the unexpected kindness, and she winked back at him.

The boy lunged for the food, but Caulfat pulled it out of his reach. “Make use of the water, then we’ll eat,” Caulfat said.

“Why, because I’m Irish? Everyone knows the Irish are a filthy lot, en’t that so?”

“I know very little about that,” Foggy said mildly. “For I’ve never been further than a gallop from the City. You may sound different, but you look no different than a London man to me.”

Sulkily, the boy scrubbed at his hands and his neck till the rag was the colour of a boar’s back. Then, his mouth set in a disgruntled line, pulled the bowl into his lap and bent low over it before untying the cloth around his eyes. He kept his face turned down as he splashed and wiped at the grime, flinging drops of water hither and thither. Water travelled down the strands of the boy’s orange hair, and dripped brown into the bowl.

Caulfat gnawed at the bread as he watched the boy tie his dingy linen blindfold over his eyes and tip the water under the table. When he raised his face, his cheeks were pink from rubbing.

“Are ye happy now?

“Truly, I’m jubilant.” Caulfat said, and pushed the plate of food into boy’s hands. Suspiciously, the lad sniffed it, then reached out and swapped their plates.

“Ye’ll no’ mind, will ye, kind sir,” he said belligerently. “If we be so sim’lar.”

“Nay,” Foggy said, refusing to be baited. He tore into his bread and put half of it on the plate the boy had taken. “I don't mind at all. Eat up.”

The boy sniffed the food again and took a cautious nibble. Apparently satisfied, he unslung his tense jaw and began to load in bread and onion.

“Why do they call you Caulfat?” the boy asked, his mouth full.

“Because I’m round as a barrel, and my father is a butcher.”

Suddenly, the boy leaned away. “Is he a rich one?” His face—what Caulfat could see of it, between the blindfold and the food he was cramming into his mouth—went wary.

“Nay. I’m no gilded mercer’s son,” Caulfat sighed. The boy felt along the table until he found Caulfat’s hand and relaxed when he traced his fingers along the work-rough knuckles and callused palm. “I’m a sailor. On the Mariah.”

“A sea captain?” the boy said impishly. He was pulling apart the onion, spreading it open like a flower and plucking the tender inner layers before slurping them from his slippery fingers.

Caulfat snorted. “I know not what I’m to do but I suspect hauling buckets will be involved.”

“Captain Caulfat,” the boy snickered.

“Captain Nelson will do. I hate the name, but no one heeds me.”

“Oh. Fergive me,” the boy felt for Caulfat’s hand again and held it. Foggy felt his heart rock in his chest, like a ship that had run aground. “Captain Nelson of the Mariah.”

Caulfat’s sister, who was a laundress like their mother, called him Foggy, for the way he used to toddle through the laundry waving his arms and giggling at the air thick with lye-smelling steam. He wanted the boy to use that name; he thought it would sound intimate and brotherly in his mouth, but to suggest such a connection on the night of their first meeting...no, that would not do. Foggy felt a pang in his heart that he’d not felt since Yeoman Harris’ dark-haired daughter had turned up her nose at his courting flowers.

“Aye,” Foggy said, a bit vaguely. “And your name, my Master?”

“Matthew Murdoch,” the boy said with a shy smile, and Nelson marveled that the mouth that was set so hard and angry a moment ago could now curve so sweetly.

“Do you eat nightly, Master Murdoch?”

“Matt. My Da called me Matt, but the English killed him.” Matt said, heaping onion atop the bread till the whole pile listed to starboard when he tried to put it in his mouth. “And I eat when I work, like all men of London.”

“Begging is work?”

“T’is harder work than thou shall ever do,” Matt said hotly.

Across the tavern, Master Duncan was laughing and tossing a coin between his hands as an old man was dancing for him desperately. His back was bent like a spoon and his rickety legs were no thicker than Matt’s walking stick. Duncan and his friends were goading the old man to kick higher, and he was sure to crack his head clean open when his legs inevitably failed him. Duncan’s money pouch, where the coin had come from, dangled from the big sailor’s belt and looked heavy as a grapevine laden with succulent fruit.

“Have you finished your food?” Foggy asked.

Matt wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Aye.”

Foggy grinned. “What do you say to a little hard work?”

Matt tipped his head back and forth, down and back, and Foggy knew somehow that he was listening to the laughs and the shouting, and above the din, the sound of Master Duncan tormenting the old man. When his lips curled up, it was a smirk of the devil’s own, mischief and wickedness and glee. “I’m listening.”

***

“Groat, groat, penny. Oh!” Foggy shouted, and pressed a coin into Matt’s hand. “That bastard had half a crown!”

Matt shoved more baked apple in his mouth and grinned. The coin twinkled as it disappeared into Matt's pocket

In the tavern, once they had licked their plates clean and drained their small-beers, Matt had tapped his way directly into the circle that surrounded the dancing man. When the audience, drunk and leering, started shouting their outrage, Matt spun in panicked circles and with his cane knocked Master James directly into Master Duncan, who was a reliable man, provided you were relying on him to be a boisterous hot-head, and it was the work of a moment and a twinkle of a finger to pinch off the money pouch as Duncan jerked forwards into the fight. Foggy gestured to the old man—who had plastered himself to the wall when the melee broke out—to meet him outside.

“May all good things come to you, my generous young Masters,” the old man had crowed when Foggy dropped thruppence into his hand as recompense for his dancing, and had tousled the hair on their heads. From inside the tavern, they heard Duncan roar the angry roar of the newly broke. The old man hared off down one alley, and Foggy threw his arm around Matt to speed him around a corner of a different one. After a few more steps, he had plucked off his cap and rammed it down on Matt’s bright orange head, which made him laugh and lean into Foggy’s side.

Now they were curled up in a doorway, but their pockets were overflowing with food and Matt still had Foggy’s cap on his head, and the rain and the smell of old piss were dampening their spirits not a jot.

Foggy popped a dried currant into his mouth. “I wish you weren't blind,” he sighed. Matt’s eyebrows lowered behind his blindfold, and Foggy continued hastily. “Then you could come to sea with me, and we could climb to the very highest yard of the ship. They say that when you stand upon’t, the sky is so close you could swallow the clouds if only you open your mouth.”

Matt’s brow unfurrowed. “It sounds like heaven to be sure. But I’m needed here, in London.”

“Aye? Your mother, she still lives?”

Matt shook his head. “Nay, I never knew her. I am—let’s say I’m an apprentice.”

Foggy paused in the act of eating a piece of honeyed bread. “An apprentice beggar?”

Matt shrugged, mouth curving enigmatically.

Foggy grinned back. “Or an apprentice thief?” Matt’s smile grew ever more mischievous. In their tavern heist, Matt had crashed into Master James expertly—his movements both graceful as dancing and innocent as the toddling of a babe. If it had been Matt’s first time wheedling coin away from the unsuspecting, Foggy would boil his own shoe and eat it with mustard.

The moon was high and it filled the muddy street with shards of light. Matt was humming to himself—something jolly about a brave sea captain and a maiden so pale—and making his cane sway back and forth between his knees. Foggy couldn’t take his eyes off Matt’s contented face, where a smear of expensive candied fig was still sticking to his chin. And when Matt flashed that smile at him, Foggy thought he’d drink a thousand tankards of Master Duncan’s piss if he could but see him smile every day.

But the wind was whipping up the stinking river, and the moon was pulling on the tide, and come morning, Foggy would sling his bag and report to his ship, bound for the distant lands.

“Matt,” he started.

“Aye, Captain Nelson?” Matt said cheekily.

“The Mariah sails on the morning tide.”

For a long moment Matt’s face remained fixed in a confused smile. Then: “You’re leaving?” he demanded, and Foggy flattered himself that Matt sounded almost crestfallen.

“We’re bound for Flanders. Master Gaiman thinks we’ll be gone two months.”

“But!” Matt cried, bit down on his lip, and under Foggy’s eyes, his face smoothed out like a freshly-washed sheet laid over a bed. “Then I wish you safe journeys.”

Foggy twisted the hem of his shirt around his finger. “You could wish me a joyous return instead,” he mumbled, not looking up.

“I wish you a joyous return,” Matt parroted flatly.

“Not now! In two months. When I actually return.”

“You’re coming back?”

“I was born here, Matt! Where else would I go?”

“You think to return to. To me? To us?”

Foggy looked down again. “I would have you waiting on the riverbank, if I thought you would do such a thing,” he said, and felt like kicking the ground, himself, and Matt, all at once.

A slow, shy, sly smile spread over Matt’s face. “Like thy wife?”

Foggy shoved at him. “Like a friend.”

Matt shoved back. “We are friends, then?”

“If thou thinkst we are.”

“You fed me, you bathed me—”

“You bathed yourself, sir, but that’s all one,” Foggy said, rolling his eyes, but he was still grinning. He hadn’t yet stopped grinning around Matt.

“—we committed a crime together,” continued Matt, snickering. “Tis naught a better basis for a friendship, aye?”

“So.” Foggy watched Matt’s cane sway back and forth. If he’d had a daisy, he’d be rending the petals. “Will thou...”

“Where there is work, Captain, I must go,” Matt said, his fingers sliding apologetically over the back of Foggy’s knuckles. “But if I hear word of the Mariah’s return, I will try to meet it.”

“Aye?”

“I swear’t.”

Foggy put his hand over Matt’s, and Matt clasped his other hand over Foggy’s. They stayed there, reluctant to part, as the wind blew the sounds of Southwark through the ever-dwindling night.


	2. Chapter 2

“Master Caulfat!” a reedy voice called.

Foggy Nelson, ship’s navigator, kept the corner of his chart from curling up by setting a seashell upon it, and turned to the voice. “Boy, call me that again and I’ll skin you like a rabbit and hang you inside out from the rigging,” he growled.

The boy who had called, Roland was his name, skidded to a halt and grabbed at his cap, his face split in a nervous, wavery grin. “Yer pardon, sir, but the men afore arsked me to arsk ye, sir, if ye think we’ll make dock by nightfall. Sir.”

Roland was a round, sweaty young sailor who giggled whenever anyone of authority—Foggy included—cast an eye upon him, and a year-long trading voyage—from London to Bruges to Amsterdam to Rotterdam to Gdansk and back again—had not yet broke him of the habit.

Foggy looked at his charts, the compass, and the sand in the hourglass. Then he hopped up on a spar to look out at the water and the particular way the waves were being whipped up by the wind.

“Hmm.”

“Sir?” Roland was wringing his cap. “Will we be in London tonight?”

“Tell your friends afore that the Captain shall hear it from me and they’ll hear it from him.”

Roland slumped. “Aye, Master Nelson.”

“Good lad.”

The ship was called the Rosaline, and its captain was the former first mate of the Mariah, Master Gaiman. She was a small square-rigged xebec, as light in the water as dew on the grass and about as spacious as the inside of a walnut shell. Master Gaiman had acquired her (he wouldn’t say how) on one of his Mediterranean voyages (he wouldn’t say which) and when he made nineteen-year-old Foggy the third mate, his first job was to inspect the bulkheads and railings for sword-gouges (he wouldn’t say from whom) and have the deep crevices stuffed with a mixture of tar and frayed rope.

“Captain.”

Gaiman put down his book. “Aye, Nelson?”

“If we can but catch a little more wind, we could make landfall on the evening tide.”

The captain smirked a little, and his eyes were knowing. “Impatient for home?”

“No sir.”

“Does no one attend upon you?”

“I know not, sir,” he shrugged. “Perhaps my sister.”

“A fine lady, is Mistress Cadie,” Captain Gaiman said admiringly. Without his meaning to, Foggy’s eyebrows lowered. The captain guffawed and shouted an order for more canvas. “Unknit your brow, my friend, you and I know each other too well to willingly join as family—I would never set my cap to her.”

“Are you saying my sister is _not fit_ to wed you?” Foggy snapped.

Gaiman laughed again and slapped his back. “Tell Roly and his friends they’ll sup with their wives and mammas if,” he raised a finger, “we unload the cargo in smart order.”

“Aye sir.” As Foggy turned back to his post, sailcloth snapped open above his head, and the dark wooden planks under his feet juddered as the Rosaline put on speed towards home.

It hadn’t really been a lie; he knew not if there would be anyone waiting for him when the ship docked. Both Foggy’s parents, old but still healthy, would be working at the market and at the laundry. In summer, their work lasted as long as the sun was in the sky. Cadie might be with their mother, but she might also be walking out with one or another lad. Foggy wondered if it would be the same one as when he’d left a year ago.

And Matt—well, the tide had taken Matt away years ago, when they were but sixteen. He would not tell Foggy where he was going, wouldn’t say if his new home was to be a palace or the gaol. He wouldn’t tell Foggy why he was leaving or who the old blind man with the walking staff was. But the blindfold he wore—a scarf of scarlet silk that Foggy had brought him back from one of the Mariah’s trading trips to Milan—had grown dark with tears.

Foggy had his letters. It wasn’t common for a boy of his birth to have learned to read, but all through Foggy’s breeching years, his mamma had been forced to take him to the manor where she was a laundress, and the youngest daughter of the house, Lady Marci, had given him her hornbooks to learn his ABCs, and as they grew older, her primers, her books of poetry, and guidebooks of navigation she’d stolen from her brothers.

“I’ll send a letter to the nearest monastery,” Foggy had pleaded with Matt. “The monks could read it to you.”

“There are no monasteries where we go, Captain,” Matt said.

“Foggy.”

“Ey?”

“Tis what my family calls me, Matt. If you must bid me farewell forever, can you at least do it like someone who—” _loves me_ , he almost said, but darted a look at the old man with the unsmiling face, “knows me?”

The old man’s mouth had twisted in disgust at Foggy’s words, and he brought his staff down on the hand that Foggy had clenched around Matt’s sleeve. That the blow was only hard enough to bruise and not shatter Foggy’s knuckles, he guessed was supposed to be a kindness.

“Enough. We depart,” the old man with the stick said, and his voice was rough as a broken cliff-face, unsmoothed by wind, or water, or use. Or love.

“Forgive me, Foggy,” Matt had said tightly, taking Foggy’s smarting hand in his and kissing it. “Forgive me. God bless you and keep you, my dearest friend. Farewell.” He turned and, using his cane, strode up the gangplank onto a galleon bound for the Orient.

That had been years ago, and they had been but boys, but now Foggy was three and twenty, and he still found himself in the tavern where they met each time he set foot on shore.

The Gull and Garter was a good, dependable Southwark tavern, full of seamen and docksmen. The serving wenches were all sailors’ daughters, and there was salt in the grain of every wooden trencher and three-legged stool. When Foggy pushed open the door, there was already a crowd of sailors drinking, and something in the swing of their arms and their energetic quaffing told Foggy that his was not the only heavily-laden ship to come into port tonight.

“Hoy, Caulfat,” the master of the tavern tipped his head.

“Evening Ned,” Foggy sighed, and flipped a penny at him. “Ale, please.”

“Aye.”

Tankard in hand, Foggy turned his back to the growing din and put up his feet by the fire. It was too late to return home; mother and father would be resting, and he had heard of too many times when butchers came under their own knives and laundresses fell into their own fires when the night before had been sleepless. He’d spend a few of his coins for a bed here, and call upon them in the morning.

Foggy’s money pouch was of soft brown leather, with a lining of silk a shade of dark, rich blue unseen in the skies or waters of England. It was the most beautiful and cherished thing he owned, and Matt had been the one who found it for him.

Not long ere he had left, they had gone walking over London Bridge, a place so crammed with people and stuff and selling that Foggy had kept a protective arm around Matt’s shoulders as they pushed their way across the entire length of the bridge. One moment, Matt had had his shoulders high against the noise that even Foggy found overwhelming, cleaved tight to Foggy’s side, the next, he had pulled them up short in front of a Moorish merchant’s cart. With unerring fingers, he had reached for a pouch, sniffed it deeply, and all but ordered Foggy to hand over his coins to the bemused merchant.

Now, he weighed the pouch in his hand and smiled. Navigating for Captain Gaiman was a good job; their cargo was plentiful and their routes along the northern borders of Europe were relatively easy unless it were winter. He was earning enough with each voyage that he could have his own boat ere he turned five and thirty. The fact that navigators were always in demand also helped. For the last five years, he hardly had the time to spend his wages on land ere there was another captain calling him to sea.

His mother, on the rare occasions that she saw him, despaired of what she saw as his restlessness.

“The money is good, mamma,” he would say, and kiss her head, trying not to mark the fact that she had grown even more stooped since he had last seen her.

But it was not only acquisitiveness that sent Foggy again and again to sea. He had tried to stay on land, walk the streets of London, go to church, and drink with his friends and neighbours. But his head turned at every flash of red and every rust-haired man he passed. So he spent five years on the water, where there was only blue as far as the eye could see—the bright blue of the sky and the deep blue of the ocean and the muddy grey blue of wood and men washed repeatedly by salt.

In the morning, Foggy would call upon Captain Kubert; he would likely have a voyage underway. His coin pouch would be a little bit heavier and he would not have to spend more than a day and a night on shore. He tucked the bag back into his jerkin.

“My Masters,” a rich voiced called, and it was accompanied by the strumming of a lute. "I hear the sea has brought men and riches both to the shores of London! Which ones among ye would have a song, eh?”

Groaning, Foggy sunk lower in his chair, praying that the high back would save him from the beggar’s attentions.

Just next to Foggy’s chair and a bit abaft, there was a table of sailors. “Zwounds,” one sighed.

“What is’t?” his friend asked, craning his neck towards the noise.

“Tis that Irishman what thinks he’s a bard. I pay him to stop singing.”

“Does that work?”

“Nay, he takes my money and sings anyway.”

“Fucking zwounds,” the friend muttered.

The balladeer made his rounds, and his voice wasn’t as foul as the sailors made it seem. He sang songs of war and songs of grief and love songs and when one young sailor asked for a song to remind him of his sweetheart back home in Bristol, the balladeer’s voice went soft and quiet, and he sat down and played The Bride’s Good Morrow just for the heartsick youth. The lad had cried quietly into his sleeve and the lad’s friends, murmuring thanks in boyish, cracking voices, made the balladeer’s pouch go clink-clink-clink with coins.

On the edge of a fire-warmed sleep, Foggy heard footsteps approach the back of his chair. “And what about you, sweet sir, would ye have a song from me?” The voice was low and rough, as if still affected by the sad song he’d sung.

“Nay, sir, I thank you but—” Foggy opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was a pair of dusty boots. The man who wore them was tall, and so very broad, and a lute worn and dull of paint, was slung over his shoulder. When he looked into the bard’s face and saw that a strip of scarlet silk was covering his eyes, he felt his breath catch.

“Are you certain, my Master?” Matt said, voice wavering slightly. “I know one about two friends who cross land and sea to find each other again.”

“God’s love!” Foggy cried, and very nearly leapt upon Matt with the force of his embrace.

“Welcome home,” Matt said, catching him and holding on. “Sweetest Foggy.”

“I should be saying that to you,” Foggy said, his face pressed against Matt’s neck. “Matt, I thought I’d never see you again! Where did you go?”

“Nor did I, Foggy, nor I.” Matt’s voice was thick and his arms were strong. “I’ve travelled—with God’s help—the world over. I’ve walked roads I could not have dreamed of.”

“Aye, as have I. I’ve sailed to places my tongue has no grace to describe, and you were there with me, I felt. That scrawny little urchin with candied fig on his chin,” Foggy said, wiping away imaginary dirt from that same chin, now square and strong. Matt chuckled, and his fingers landed on Foggy’s cheek, tracing the outline of his face. “But look at you! What a man you’ve become.”

Matt had grown tall—nearly a head taller than Foggy and he had a hard-muscled shape under his dusty red jerkin. His chest was abominably wide and strong and furred with hair the colour of the sunset, and when Foggy mind turned to the other parts of Matt’s anatomy over which that sunset might travel, he heard the bells of St. Botolph's tolling madly in his ears.

Matt’s big hands shaped themselves around Foggy’s shoulders. “And thee, Captain, thou art as broad as a doorway! I nearly marked not thy voice when thou spoke.”

The familiar “thou” rocked Foggy back, made something inside him snap open like a sail full of wind and suddenly he was blown years into the past, when he and Matt were boys who spoke as intimately as the way skin brushed on skin in the summer heat.

But he wasn’t that boy any longer, he’d done his growing and he was a sailor besides. He was well educated in all the little comforts that God took away from children in the fullness of time. So as he gazed at Matt’s face and felt how solid and real he was, Foggy swallowed hard and told himself that the boys were gone and the men were not the same.

“How did you know it was me?”

A blunt finger poked Foggy in the chest. Under his jerkin, coins clinked. “There are precious few blue silk coin bags in London since Battuta the merchant returned to the Moorish countries.”

Foggy blinked, uncomprehending.

“Indigo dye, Foggy.”

“Oh, indeed! Your whippet-hound’s nose that can smell a pie in St. Albans.”

“Nay,” Matt grinned. “Far better than a whippet-hound now.”

“You keep telling yourself that. But come, you must sit with me. Ned!” Foggy called over the din.

“Whot?” The tavern keeper yelled back. “I’m busy!”

“A bottle of your best sack, Ned! If you’re not too busy to take my coin.”

“ _Right away_ , Master Nelson!”

***

Three bottles later, Matt was draped over Foggy’s back and humming.

“By God, I could set these arms to music,” he mumbled, dragging his big hands over Foggy’s biceps, squeezing and tracing the contours of the muscles Foggy had developed from years of hauling ropes.

“Rot,” Foggy said amiably, and raised the alcohol to his lips—the cups had rolled away a bottle and a half ago.

“There was a handsome captain, and he sailed upon the sea...” Matt sang.

“Purgatory and fucking hellfire,” Foggy muttered.

“And his shoulders, by God, they were as broad as a tree...” he was warbling drunkenly now, in a ludicrous falsetto that made several sailors turn and glare.

“Hush or be stuffed,” Foggy tried to say sternly, but he was laughing too hard.

“How do you ever earn so much as a groat with that voice?”

“I smile,” Matt replied, his lips curving in a grin so perfect and attractive that Foggy was drawn towards it like a needle to a lodestone.

In the years he was away, Matt had become—he was _beautiful_. It was as if God himself had tended Matt like a flower, erasing all the traces of filth and neglect that Foggy had found upon him at their first meeting and returning to England’s shores a man of wiry strength and a sly self-confidence that was as obvious and alluring as the creaminess of his skin and the burnish of his hair.

Foggy shook himself, realized how deep he had burrowed into Matt’s warmth, and put some space between them.

“Tis a pity you can’t see how ugly you grew up,” he coughed, swigging from the bottle again.

Matt rubbed his chin and his eyebrows lowered in confusion. “I’ve been told I’m rather fair!”

Foggy made a sad noise between his teeth, and patted Matt’s handsome face consolingly. “It’s like a mule walking away with its tail pointed up,” he lied.

“Well, in that case, God forgive all those lasses who committed the sin of untruth just to get me under their skirts,” Matt snickered, and grabbed for the bottle of sack. “Though I suppose by morning the sin of flattering untruth was easily forgettable compared with all the rest.”

Foggy groaned, and snatched the bottle out of Matt’s hand. “Speak to me not of lasses,” he grumbled.

“Why not?” Matt wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What is better in this world than pretty lasses?”

“I know not,” Foggy sighed, and swigged again.

“Your arms, mayhap,” Matt smirked, reaching around for another grope.

Foggy harrumphed but held still for Matt’s touch. “My God, you’re full of shite,” he said admiringly. “Your eyes must be a brown so stinking that night soil men sigh to see them.”

“My eyes are blue. Or in my memory they were, the last time I looked in the river,” Matt said, his voice considering and suddenly not all that confident. “Foggy, can ye—would ye remind me?”

Foggy stared, at Matt’s uncertain mouth, at his pinked cheeks, and nodded. “I nodded. Of course I can.”

Matt reached for the knot at the back of his head and let the scarlet silk slip down.

It took Matt a moment to raise his chin and sweep his hair out of his face. He opened his eyes.

They _were_ blue. They were the pale blue of the mist off the coast of Denmark in January, moments before sunrise. Foggy had spent a trade voyage standing the middle watch enveloped in that mist, the thin blue-grey light imparting nearly no warmth, and he remembered wishing that Matt was there. Even if he were below deck, snoring away in a hammock, his presence on the ship somehow would have made Foggy stronger against the cold.

“I am full of bile that I must say this, but the lasses lied not,” Foggy said, and his voice was appallingly weak. “You are fair as the rising sun.”

Matt’s smile was a slow spread of delighted warmth over his face. “Oh, that’s grand. Tell me more of my great beauty, my most dear Captain.”

Foggy rolled his eyes again. His heart might have stretched uselessly across oceans and years to touch the memory of Matt the boy, but by God the grown man was aggravating. “Why don’t you tell me of mine?” he said, not a little bitterly.

“I have been, all evening! Did you think that was in jest?”

“Yes?”

“I swear by almighty God, Foggy!” huffed Matt. “What is thy Christian name? Never mind, I haven’t the time—thou art as sharp as pumpkin, I swear’t.”

“Round as a pumpkin, you mean,” mumbled Foggy.

Matt made a frustrated hair-pulling gesture and tackled Foggy to the ground. “By all the saints in heaven, why did God cursed me with loneliness all these years? He could have reminded me that thou art an absolute horse’s arse!” he laughed, and then laid his head on Foggy’s chest. “I have been lonely for thee.”

“I as well,” Foggy said faintly, watching in alarm as his arms snaked themselves over Matt’s back and his fingers sink into his hair. “For you. For thee.”

“For me?” Matt said softly, his red lips turning up.

Foggy was about to say “of course, for thee,” but a boot toe nudged him in the side.

“Gentlemen,” Ned said, looking down at them over his prodigious stomach. “Sleeping ‘appens in beds. The beds are upstairs. And you’ve paid for nowt.”

“But this is much more comfortable.” Matt said.

“Dunnae make me pitch you out on your arse, bard,” Ned said sharply.

“I invite you to try it, barman,” Matt said, not raising his head.

Foggy cuffed Matt on the side of the head, but softly. “Don’t start fights my first night on land. We’ll be going now, Ned.”

The ships on the water were creaking gently in the night breeze as they ambled unsteadily along the river.

“We should find a cottage.” Matt said, looping his arm through Foggy’s. His stick went tap-tap-tap on the cobbles ahead of them.

“Ey?”

“I said a cottage, have you a fig in your ear? Near to the river—the south bank.”

“Live together? Like husband and wife?” The words were out of Foggy’s mouth before he could stop them.

Matt halted and goggled—somehow managing it through the red blindfold—and then he laughed and shoved at Foggy, sending him skipping nearly into a ditch.

“Like friends,” Matt said, catching Foggy’s wrist and pulling him back. Foggy’s breath whoofed out when Matt kept pulling, tucked him underneath his arm, and smiled down at him. “Dearest of friends.”

Foggy put his hand over the indigo silk purse in his pocket, thought about it dwindling down by rent paid and meat for the pot, saw his ship and his captaincy sail further and further over the horizon. Life on land, with Matt? It would be joyful, and it would be poor. And before long, it would be resentful.

“I...I can’t,” he said. “I work upon the sea, Matt. I must go—”he bit his tongue.

“—where the work is,” Matt finished for him.

“Forgive me. If I could—” but Matt waved him quiet.

After a few more steps, Matt unclasped Foggy’s shoulders. The cold night air bit at his skin that had been warmed by Matt’s closeness.

“Aye,” Matt said, after a while. “Aye, perhaps that’s wise. I shall be leaving London ere long.”

“Aye,” Foggy said morosely. “Wait, leaving?”

“You’re not the only man in London who does a job,” Matt’s voice was as cold as he’d ever heard it.

Foggy swallowed, feeling lower to the ground than a worm. “Of course.” They walked in silence.

“Someone is calling your name,” Matt said, as they neared the harbour.

Foggy turned and scanned the forest of masts, the rows of hulls huddled together like bowls in a washing tub. A man was standing on the edge of one of the hulls, waving his cap at Foggy and beckoning. It was Captain Kubert.

“Oh. Tis Kubert. Matt, do you mind? The Captain probably wants me for his trip to Spain.”

Matt lifted his chin. “Tis nothing to me.”

“Of course not,” Foggy sighed, and raised his hand to wave at his next employer.

***

After Kubert’s voyage to Spain, there was Gaiman’s—again—to Istanbul. Then Captain Waid’s trade mission—that had been a fantastically profitable journey to Morocco, and afterwards, Foggy was tanned and perfumed, another year older, and very nearly happy.

He returned to London in in the flowering of spring—that’s what the poets called it anyway; there were no flowers within an hour’s ride of the cottage he shared with his parents, but there was yellow grass, and a sliver of the Thames not clogged with ships and the sound of sailors.

As Foggy sat on the riverbank with a handful of market-stall blackcurrants in his handkerchief and bottle of beer next to him, he watched ships sail past. Ships that held his fellow sailors, breaking their backs for their wives and children, or for their parents, or just for another day of food when they returned to shore. The difference between Foggy and his fellows, though, was that return they did, and when they did, they had someone waiting for them. He lay back on the bank and looked at the sky, felt the wind through the sweet heather and the movelessness of the ground, but when he looked to the side with a contented smile, he was surprised to find there was no one there.

The next morning, he went to Gaiman, cap in hand, and asked that a substitute navigator be engaged for the next voyage.

“Not everyone is married to the sea, Nelson,” Gaiman chuckled. “I’m to Portchester, to see my wife. I shan’t sail for three months. Will you have your fill of land by then?”

Foggy considered the tops of his shoes. “Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” Gaiman said quizzically.

“There is someone who made a call upon me. To stay.”

Gaiman looked delighted—he’d been after Foggy to marry for years. “When did this happy event take place?”

Foggy rubbed his face. “After Gdansk.”

The captain’s beaky nose wrinkled. “We’ve been to the East since.”

“Aye, sir.”

“And Waid was surely flush with silver a fortnight ago and praising your name.”

“We sailed to Morocco. And I went to Spain as well, some months earlier.”

Gaiman blinked, then put his face in his hands in a movement of a man trying to come to grips with unutterable foolishness. “Master Nelson, do you know the difference between a sailor and a man who runs away to sea?”

“Aye, tis—”

“Tis what he leaves on land, sir. Whether his absence benefits his loved ones or himself.”

Foggy huffed. “I wasn’t running away.”

“Three voyages is an age in the life of a love affair,” Gaiman said, standing and pinning Foggy with a knowing eye.

“Love affair? There is no love affair!”

“And there mayn't ever be if you hie off under a sail every time your sweetheart asks you to stay!”

“Sir, I must beg my leave of you,” Foggy said, all in a rush. Matt was no one’s sweetheart. Well, perhaps that wasn’t true; perhaps one or another of Matt’s lasses claimed him in such a way. But Foggy wasn’t in search of a sweetheart. And if he was, it would certainly not be Matt.

But if he were to be honest, he did long to wake up with the knowledge that Matt was within reach, rather than with the wondering of where he was and if he was well, or even alive. And having Matt on the other side of the cottage rather than the other side of the globe would be of great help to that longing, but that certainly didn’t make them sweethearts.

“Oh peace, Nelson,” Gaiman said in an exasperated voice. He threw some coins in a bag and tossed it at Foggy. “There’s an advance on your next trip with me. Come back in three months.” Foggy bowed hastily and lunged for the door. Gaiman called after him, “you know, tis not such a terrible thing to have someone waiting on the shore for thee, my friend.”

***

So Foggy rented a cottage—a pleasant one far enough away from the noisy town that it caught the smell of the heather on the wind and kept the rabble to a murmur, and he waited. He haunted the Gull and Garter till Ned started to glare at him for taking up a chair without buying a drink. He walked the length of the city of London, letting his eye draw him to every flash of red, but there was no one. On days where he worried about the diminishment of his coins, he hauled bales of stinking linen for his mother or carcasses for his father.

Some days, he put a bunch of daisies on the table or kept a candle in the window, even though he knew Matt wouldn’t see them. And he waited.

At the end of three months, he reported to the Rosaline. Gaiman hallooed him from the deck with a wide, well-rested smile. His smile faltered as he got nearer.

“God’s love, man. You look like a hind-quarters of a dead dog.”

“You have my thanks, Captain, verily,” Foggy said sourly.

“What happened? Did she—”

Foggy cut him off with a sad smile. “I waited. But it must have been too late.” Gaiman’s face went briefly stricken—he was a romantic under that calm exterior—but he slapped Foggy’s back heartily. “I have a month in Rouen. Wine, spices, vellum. Silks if they can be gotten. My bookkeeper seems to do his sums by a different star each day, so if you can double his post, you will be most welcome. Come. The sea calls.”

“Aye sir,” Foggy sighed, and let himself be led up the gangplank.


	3. Chapter 3

Rouen was cool breezes, good beer, and beautiful men.

“Monsieur Nelson,” one such man called. He was slim and chestnut-haired, and he was leading a caravan of carts and barrows and equally gorgeous men carrying enormous, bulging bundles on their gleaming shoulders. “Nous livrons les vins et la soie.”

“Merci, Luc,” Foggy called, putting down his quill.

“Silks go to the fore, wines aft,” he said, after counting bottles and examining the fineness of the fabric, and Luc shouted orders to the porters.

“We drink some wine tonight, maybe?” Luc winked. “Toi et moi?”

Foggy blinked—his French was rough but passable, the result of repeated trips to the continent more than any consistent tutelage—but even he knew that what Luc was offering with that familiar “toi” was more than just a few glasses of stolen Anjou Blanc.

Foggy shook his head. “We sail on the evening tide.”

Luc’s perfect mouth pursed in a perfect frown. “Quel dommage,” he said, smoothing a wrinkle on Foggy’s jerkin.

“Halloo!” A voice called from the dock. “Is this the Rosaline bound for England?”

With a pained grimace, Foggy stepped away from Luc. “Aye sir, she is,” he called, sticking his head over the railing, “Do you seek passage—”

The rust-haired man on the dock tilted his head. “Foggy?”

Foggy rubbed the sun out of his eyes. “Matt?”

“How great is God’s blessing in this distant land?” Matt said, and his grin was broader than the Seine. “What is your business in Rouen?”

“French silk, and the best wine in the world,” Luc snapped, but Foggy was already striding down the gangplank.

“I waited for you after Spain. For three months. I found a cottage,” Foggy said accusingly. “It was by the river, just as you said.”

Matt’s mouth dropped open, but he shut it with a snap and raised his chin. “I knew nothing of that.”

“Where did you go?”

“Košice. Laone. Liepzig...” Matt said with a wry twist of his lips. “Ye ken. Wherever the wind took me.”

Foggy snorted to keep from pointing out that the wind could not have taken Matt to any of those landlocked towns and travelling in a carriage over winding roads for weeks rather belied the whimsy of his words. “Do you miss England?”

“Nay.” Matt said. Foggy snorted again. “But I have missed thee. I would have returned, Foggy, if I had known.” Matt put his hand out beseechingly, but before he made contact, he tilted his head, and Foggy knew that he was marking that Luc was still standing at the railing. He dropped his voice. “Your man is still listening.”

“He's not my man,” Foggy said, months of heartache blowing away like a spray of salt water. “I only have one of those and he's a rank fool. But in that, we are a pair,” Foggy said wryly, and put his arms around Matt.

“Sweetest Foggy,” Matt sighed, spinning him in circles. “Ye ken I'm but a fool for thee.”

“Merde,” muttered Luc.

***

Rouen to London was a short trip, no more than four days even with the wind against them, and the Rosaline was loaded up with ragged passengers making the hop back to England. The crew was ragged as well—scrounged youths and men trading rough labour for the price of passage.

Matt more or less spent his time plucking at his lute and lodging himself in increasingly inconvenient areas of the ship. Seagoing life suited Matt terrible ill, for men bumped and elbowed each other in the running of a ship and more than one of them had knocked Matt to the deck in his haste to push past. On one evening, Foggy found him lying on bolts of silk in the hold.

“God’s teeth, come away from there,” Foggy hissed. “Those are for sale, you unwashed oaf.”

Matt lifted his head. “Unwashed oaf? You wound me, Caulfat.”

“And I told you not to call me that.”

“The men call ye that.”

“I know. Not even threat of whipping stops them. Come out of the hold, Matt. This instant.”

“Shan’t, tis quiet and I like it.” Matt laced his fingers together behind his head and set his mouth stubbornly.

“Oh, fucking hellfire—” Foggy wrapped both hands around Matt’s ankle and pulled. Matt landed with a soft thump, his protest muffled behind Foggy’s palm as two men entered the hold and eased the hatch shut behind them.

“Who is’t?”

“Tis Alfie and Wat,” Foggy whispered, pressing Matt against a bulk of cargo to keep him quiet. The impish humour in Matt’s face bled to confusion as two sailors began to kiss.

Everyone on board the Rosaline knew about Alfie and Wat. They’d also been on the Mariah with Foggy and then first mate Gaiman, and the way they looked at each other—when they thought no one was looking—put Foggy in mind of the way his father looked at his mother: a love so shining it could burn off the mist of the dawn. Wat was roughly literate and a good man to have in a haggle, and Gaiman sent him over land more often than not to support the ship’s official negotiators. More than once, facing an implacable European trader over the negotiating table, Foggy had seen Wat lean into their negotiator and whisper something like “his wife likes apricots” or, “his horse is a roan” or some other inexplicable fact. Then the negotiator would nod and somehow with that information haggle the trader down by a fifth of the price.

This morning was the first time he’d clapped eyes on his lover in—if the travel records were to be believed—nine months.

“What are they doing?” Matt hissed.

Foggy closed his eyes and put his forehead down on Matt’s back. He'd certainly heard a belt clinking open, and then there was a rustle of lentils inside their burlap sacks as Alfie threw his head back.

They're fucking, Matt,” Foggy whispered tiredly.

“Nay, what are they doing?” Matt whispered again, urgently. “I’m blind, Foggy.”

Alfie hissed, the lentils moved again, and Wat moaned, his mouth full and the sound obscenely muffled. It could only be one thing. “You can’t tell?” Foggy glanced at Matt when he grimaced and shook his head. “Wat, uh—he suckles at Alfie.”

“But what does that mean?”

This had to be some sort of joke, Foggy thought. “Alfie’s, uh—” he gestured between Matt’s legs, uselessly, “his cock is Wat’s mouth.”

Matt’s eyebrows arched high over his blindfold. “Oh.”

“Wat, my darling, thy sweet mouth, I love you, I love you,” Alfie groaned, curled his body around Wat’s head and shook and shook and shook. When Wat pulled off, he spat into the crook of his elbow and then lay his head on his lover’s chest. They spoke tenderly to each other, and of a caretaker’s cottage on a manor in Sheffield where they could live together in peace. It was the reason Wat put himself forward for the over-land journeys that paid better than easy jaunts between ports. Foggy grit his teeth. Private moments of a lustful nature were rarely private aboard a ship, but one man making a lifelong pledge always to have the fire stoked in the morning so the other would never have to put his feet on the cold ground—that was something Foggy felt he should not have overheard.

The sailors kissed some more, and when Wat clambered off his lover and held a hand out help him off the sacks of lentils—Foggy would never manage to hand them over to Master Gollings the merchant with a straight face now—they jostled and shoved and swore at each other good-naturedly, joking and jabbing, and if the smell of Alfie’s seed were not still in the air, Foggy would have denied to his grave that those two sailors had known each other in the biblical sense.

“They’re both men,” Matt whispered, awed, once he and Foggy were alone.

“What of it?” Everyone on the Mariah had, one day or another, walked in on Wat and Alfie, and those who had served with them then protected them now from sailors on the Rosaline who were not as sentimental about a love that stretched over twelve years. But Matt was a Catholic, and more importantly Foggy knew he wanted to be a good one. If he sought to bring trouble to any of the long-serving sailors aboard the Rosaline, Gaiman would not hesitate to make his considerable displeasure known and Foggy could not say, even with all the true and honest love he bore Matt, on which side of the line he would stand.

But Matt’s face was gentled and his mouth dropped open in wonder. “I knew not that it could be done like that.”

Foggy let out a relieved gust of breath that could have blown the ship half a league. He propped his elbows on a case of wine and wiped his sweaty brow. “Indeed, I marvel at your innocence,” Foggy laughed, relief making him jocular. “Did none of the lasses never...”

"What lasses?”

“What lasses? Thy lasses, the ones that lied to get thee under their skirts!”

“Oh, those lasses.” Matt went even redder. “There were perhaps not as many lasses as I vouchsafed...”

“Ho,” Foggy snorted, “the truth shows itself. You play the scoundrel, Matt Murdoch, but it seems the great lover is naught but a blushing boy.”

“Hush.” Matt shoved at him. “Is there no work ye should be doing, Captain?”

“Aye, there is,” Foggy admitted, pulling the ship’s inventory out of his pocket. “Go sit with yon case of Burgundian wine, Matt, and I’ll mark thee with thy kin, for you have some of the same complexion.” Foggy said, poking Matt’s pink face with his finger.

Matt flapped away the touch with his hand and for a while there was only the sound of a Foggy counting and muttering under his breath as he checked the cargo against his lists. “Foggy?”

“Ey?” Foggy mumbled, a vellum deed of sale clenched between his teeth and one in each hand, hunting through the lines of scribble for evidence of the case of Armagnac that he’d found shoved between two barrels of books. What sort of example did Gaiman think he was setting, smuggling thus? If he was going to break the law, why do it for such small amounts?

“Can we try it?”

“Try what?” Foggy said, shoving the Armagnac behind some wine, to better disguise it when it was to be offloaded.

“What Wat and Alfie did.”

Foggy spat out the parchment. “You want to...”

“Aye.”

“With me?” he choked.

“Who else?”

Matt’s grin was a scythe of light in the dusty, dim hold and Foggy let out a breath—of a feeling that was equal parts relief and disappointment—at the rakish, cheeky tilt of it. Of course Matt hadn’t meant it genuinely. He was Irish and had spent a great deal of time in the East. Of course his sense of humour was—foreign, to say the least.

“Have a care, Master Murdoch, a man who has spent his life in a wooden tub with naught but other men might take thy offer as honestly given,” he said dryly.

Matt’s grin wavered, but then he kissed the tips of his fingers with a flourish, like a true rake, and disappeared through the hatch.

***

For the rest of the sailing to London, Matt was conspicuously absent, but Foggy was doing his accustomed work of navigation and overseeing the work of the ship’s bookkeeper—who did, as the Captain had intimated, seem to invent a new method of figuring over the course of each day—and hardly noticed.

“Caulfat, can ye get yer arsing paramour off me arsing bowsprit,” the lead rigger barked at Foggy the evening before they were meant to arrive in London.

“Oh peace, Davey,” Foggy said, but he heaved himself up from his navigator’s table.

“I’ll be peaceable when I don’t have a bloody Irish troubadour ‘anging from bits of me rigging,” the rigger snapped, hands on his hips.

Matt was perched precariously on the bowsprit, his head resting on the thick rope that attached to the headsail. He was strumming idly and singing something amorous and off-key.

“Master Murdoch, you’re in the way.”

“How can that be, I’m not even on the ship,” Matt said, waving a hand underneath himself. The bowsprit was an arm that extended from the front of the hull, and if Matt somehow slipped, he would tumble straight into the water. He was, in word if not in spirit, not _on_ the ship. But the bowsprit was the tying-off point of a great many ropes, and if any of those ropes came undone under Matt’s arse, whole sections of the rigging would come all a-tangle, not to mention that the snapping ropes would pull Matt in twain if they wrapped around his body. “And besides, Captain, it stinks less here than down below.”

“Here, he’s not the Captain, you bloody fool!” Davey yelled. “And my ship doesn’t stink!”

“Careful, Davey, else I shall fall in love with your sweet words,” Matt simpered back, and Davey stomped off to terrorize one of the boys who hauled the buckets.

“Come down from there, sir, ere the captain—the real captain—vents his considerable spleen upon you.”

Matt’s eyebrows raised and Foggy grimaced. Gaiman had greeted Matt like a long-lost brother, relieved that Foggy had something in his life that was not constituted entirely of star charts and the anxious tap of a fingernail upon the compass glass.

“I shall love him truer than the star of the north, stronger than the winds from the east, further than the sun in the west, and deeper than—ow—the fathoms of the sea,” Matt had pledged theatrically as Foggy pulled his cap over his eyes and stood on Matt’s foot.

“I’ll see you wed ere long, Nelson,” Gaiman had guffawed at Matt’s antics and Foggy’s embarrassment. “But in the meantime, he’ll do.”

No, Gaiman would not force Matt to go anywhere, and indeed running to the captain to solve the trivial matter of where onboard ship Matt saw fit to berth his hindquarters was beneath Foggy’s post.

“Where shall it please thee for me to go, my dove?” Matt strummed a chord and smiled. Roland, walking past with a coil of rope in his arms, snorted a giggle. When he felt Foggy’s glare on him, he stumbled, giggled nervously again, and scurried in the direction of a knot of other sailors with a definite air of rumour-spreading.

“Wonderful,” Foggy muttered, knowing that there would be tales of Foggy’s secret marriage to a Catholic before the first dog watch. “I would have you stay below decks, perhaps in your hammock.”

Matt sniffed. “Half a shroud strung from a bit of string. The air is sweeter above deck. The company too, is it not, Davey?” Matt called at the still-loitering sailor.

“Break thy neck!” Davey hollered. “Choke a sea-serpent with thy corpse!” Matt clutched a theatrically affronted hand on his chest.

“Would you be contented in mine?” Foggy asked, gritting his teeth so he didn’t laugh.

“Thy hammock?” Matt waggled his eyebrows.

“God give me strength—my cabin, Master Murdoch.”

“Oh.” Matt slung his lute onto his back and walked the length of the bowsprit like a tightrope, using his cane afore him to find his way, then hopped down onto the deck nimbly. He tapped along the deck till he stood nose to nose with Foggy. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? I’ll await upon thee, my dove.” He patted Foggy’s cheek and called for a boy to lead him to the cabins.

Several men hooted, and Foggy felt his face go hot as the sands of southern Spain. “The lash, the lash for all of you, I swear on a mountain of bibles,” he groused.

***

Matt was not—and really, Foggy should not have expected he would be—in the cabin when his watch ended. Foggy stuck his head back out the door and scanned the corridor.

“Fucking hellfire,” he swore.

“Do you kiss the reliquaries with that mouth?” an amused voice said.

Foggy looked around. “Normally, I kiss reliquaries not at all,” he said to the empty cabin.

“Protestants,” Matt sniffed, and slung himself through the porthole as light as a cat.

Foggy peered out the narrow aperture at the sheer drop. “Hast thou sprouted wings?”

“Nay, but tis most convenient that the outside of thy ship is studded with lumps.”

“Aye, alas, she was built in Italy, where they confuse ornament with seaworthiness, but she is a good ship nonetheless,” Foggy said dazedly. Surely Matt hadn’t clung to the side of the rocking ship using naught but those hideous cherubim and twisted columns as handholds. “By God how did you keep from falling?”

“Tis easy to fear not that which you see not,” Matt said easily.

Foggy threw himself into the hammock, feeling every single bone in his back cry out in relief. “How fortunate. I wish to see thee not, so I shall close my eyes by your leave.”

“I give thee leave,” Matt said grandly, and got in the hammock behind him. Foggy’s eyes popped open and he went rigid as a plank as two arms encircled his waist. “What ails you now, sweetling?” Matt murmured.

“Nothing,” Foggy squeaked.

“Good.” Matt kissed his hair, and Foggy was surprised to find that even though Matt was laid closer against his back than whitewash laid on a wall, there truly was nothing ailing him.

They lay in quiet for a long moment, Foggy’s breathing settling, as it always did, into the rocking of the ship. After a while, he noticed that Matt’s breathing had matched his own, and then they were all three of them—sailor, ship, traveller—sharing the same beating heart.

***

In the still nights that seem endless when a ship is cutting through dark silent waters, sailors will often run a hand along her smoothed wood and feel a sort of kinship with all the others that sail upon her, feeling like the only live beings on the surface of God’s earth—one ship of one collective soul.

But in the morning, there is always a welcoming port, and the berths on other ships, and farewells. All souls must split apart when they encounter land.

The morning the Rosaline was due into London, Foggy woke up warm, which was not a common occurrence onboard ship, and certainly not on one crossing the cold waters of the Channel. He rubbed his face into the hard bolster that was sewn to one end of his hammock as a pillow.

“Good morn,” the pillow said.

Foggy’s eyes flashed open. “Good morn,” he said slowly, and began calculating how best he could climb out of the hammock without somehow tipping Matt out the other side. “What are you doing here?”

“Sleeping. Or I had been afore ye began to fuss like a damp cat.”

“This is my hammock.”

“Aye, I did notice it smelled less of tar and unwashed arses than the berths below.”

“You are an unwashed arse,” Foggy mumbled, lifted a leg experimentally, and promptly fell out. “I have a boat to unload, I beg your leave,” he said hastily, pulling on his boots and lunging for the door.

“Foggy!” Matt called. “Before you run away, answer me a question.”

Foggy peeked around the bulkhead. Matt was lounging in the still-swaying hammock, his head pillowed on his hands. A puff of scarlet silk blindfold protruded from his sleeve and his sightless eyes were pale and unfathomable as the sea. His smile was tipped up on one side.

“Aye?” He asked cautiously.

“Will ye stay in London now?”

“I know not. Perhaps. There is always work.” Foggy put his forehead against the doorframe and imagined resting it against Matt’s shoulder as they sat in the river-side heather. He took a deep breath. “I would stay if you bade me.”

Matt grinned, and held out a hand. Foggy was holding it before he decided to.

“I bid you, stay,” Matt whispered. He pulled on Foggy’s arm and, slow and unstoppable as the tide, pushed up and brushed their lips together.

“I shall,” Foggy said breathlessly.

"I thank you,” Matt said, and his hand crept through Foggy’s hair to cup the back of his neck. Foggy could feel Matt’s breath on his mouth.

“You’re welcome.”

Up on deck, a bell began to toll. “London bids you a joyous return!” Captain Gaiman shouted into the belly of the ship. “We’re home, lads!”

Foggy detached Matt’s hand and kissed it, which made Matt’s expression grow even more fond and delighted. “The cargo, I must—”

“I’ll await thee on the riverbank.”

As they unloaded the Rosaline’s riches, the ships’ hands were a happy lot. The jaunt had been simple but the profits many, and they whistled as they worked. Foggy stood on the bank and shouted orders as the Rosaline was emptied of her wealth of crates, bales, bolts, and sacks.

“Sir.” A woman’s voice made Foggy turn.

Her face was hidden behind a hood and a veil delicate as a spider’s web, but Foggy saw bright green eyes and crimson hair. “Mistress,” he bowed. “First mate Nelson, at your service.”

“Does Matthew Murdoch sail upon this ship?” she asked, nodding at the Rosaline. Her voice bore an accent, perhaps of the Muscovites, and she was pale and delicate as porcelain.

“He does, Mistress. Do you seek him?”

“I seek him,” she agreed.

Foggy nodded, and collared a passing Roly. “Go find the troubadour, and fetch him out,”

“Why?” Roland shot the lady a suspicious glance, and Foggy gave him a shake, a scolding on his tongue.

“Say his wife awaits him,” the lady said, before Foggy could open his mouth.

Foggy shouldn’t have been surprised. He was despite his best efforts, and it shamed him. Roly shot Foggy a horrified look, one hand clasped over his mouth. “You see, boy?” Foggy said with a strained, feigned heartiness. “Stand not in the way of true love. Go on now.”

***

Matt and his lady wife—Natasha—had a brief conversation before she kissed his cheek, lifted her skirts over the puddles, and strode towards a carriage without once looking back at her husband.

“A marriage you neglected to mention,” Foggy said dully. “May God give you joy.”

“She is not my wife,” Matt said.

“Ey? Who is she then?”

“We work together.”

“I do not kiss the people I work with.”

Matt pressed his lips together till they went bloodless. “What would you have me say? We were sweethearts. Once. Years ago.”

“I see,” Foggy said tightly.

“She tells me I am needed. Our employer summons me.”

“So you leave London again.”

Matt touched Foggy’s shoulder. “I would stay if I could. Please. Forgive me.”

Foggy shrugged the off the touch, but brushed Matt’s knuckles with his own when their hands were hidden from view. “We are men of London, Matt, and we must work. I begrudge it not.”

Lips pressed together again, this time in a sad, frustrated smile, Matt squeezed Foggy’s hand tightly before letting go and calling for one of the bucket boys to lead him to Lady Natasha’s carriage.


	4. Chapter 4

In the spring, the lady wife of Captain Gaiman called on Foggy at the lodging house he had started to use between trips. The captain had died, and left the Rosaline to Foggy in his will.

A ship of his own. He was a captain, and at only six and twenty. All the money he had saved to buy his own ship could be turned towards—Foggy’s mind reeled—a second ship. A more comfortable life for his parents, or a dowry for his sister.

A cottage for Matt.

“I intend to keep control of the import business, Master Nelson,” Mistress Gaiman was saying, “but my husband thought well of you, and I would have you sail for me if you agree to it.”

Foggy thumbed his wet eyes and bowed. “All will prosper under you, Mistress,” he said, trying not to sniffle. “Your husband kept not the secret of your great intelligence and your guidance of his affairs. I would be honoured to captain the Rosaline for you and to care for all who sail within her.”

Mistress Gaiman rose and extended her hand, and Foggy when went to bow over it again, she spoke again. “I loved my husband, Master Nelson, and you were his very dear friend. But do not think us diminished. We still have business to attend to.” She looked at him square in the face, without a hint of demureness, and the glint in her eye was evaluating.

“Mistress Gaiman.” He took her strong hand and shook it.

“My factors will expect you in Malta in a month. _Captain_ Nelson.”

“It will be my pleasure to meet them, my Lady.”

***

“Almighty God in heaven, who protects sailors and children and people who do stupid things,” Foggy prayed grumpily in the Rosaline’s claustrophobic captain’s chamber. “Please save me from this time of great trial and get me out of here, Malta is hell.”

“Captain?” Roland Buttle stuck his head in the door. He’d been made second mate upon Foggy’s promotion, and while he was still working on the giggling, he was a strong, able sailor of three and twenty, and Foggy’s dearest companion in a lonely seafaring life.

“Die in a thrice-damned fire, Roly,” Foggy snapped.

A smothered giggle, then a cough. “Right away Captain, but your guests are asking to speak to you.”

“They are not my guests, they are people who lied to get on my ship.” But Foggy was rising anyway, pushing his tugged-upon hair back into order and buttoning up his jerkin.

On the deck of the Rosaline, the Maltese diplomat and his wife that Foggy had been tasked to escort past Spanish waters into England were idling upon the deck, taking in the glorious fair weather of the Mediterranean Sea. She, the wife, was a graceful, elegant woman in a cloak the colour of the sky and a veil that shaded her from the sun. But no mere scrap of cobweb lace could hide her emerald eyes or her tempting smile, and sailors up and down the deck would walk into each other when she was near.

He, built like an Italian marble, was leaning back with his handsome face tipped up into the Mediterranean sunshine that felt to Foggy like thick satin compared to the sack-cloth sunshine that could be had in England. He dressed in a decidedly European fashion, which meant he wore his jerkin open and his shirt unlaced nearly to the navel. He also had strange eyes—though they saw all, they never seemed to move. And they were most affecting for they were the colour of the sky at dawn.

As Foggy approached them, the husband smiled and scratched his collarbone, which sent his shirt gaping even further. Behind her veil, the wife rolled her eyes.

“Your Grace,” Foggy gritted out as he bowed.

“Captain,” the lady replied, bowing back.

“Natasha,” Matt chided. “We discussed this. _I’m_ the ambassador. You’re my wife.”

“No one is going to believe that,” Lady Natasha sighed, and Foggy looked longingly at the waves—in the sunlight, they did look _so_ nice to drown in. “And stand up straight; you look like a hogherd. You’re supposed to be a nobleman.”

“A true nobleman wouldn’t care what he looked like,” Matt retorted with sourness.

Natasha’s fingers went up under her veil to pinch the bridge of her nose. “That’s not how it works, Matthew. _Bozhe moi_ , we’re going to get caught,” she moaned softly.

“Dear God, please also save me from being executed for spying,” muttered Foggy, the complicit ferryman.

“Don’t worry,” Matt said, reaching out and running a knuckle down Foggy’s cheek. It was a coin toss as to whether he was more likely to purr like a stroked pet or smack the condescending touch away. “What could possibly happen?”

“Sail!” one of the sailors shouted from the top of the t’gallant yardarm. Foggy squeezed his eyes shut. “A stranger’s sail!”

“Oh,” Matt said, as Foggy and Natasha sent each other weary looks. Their initial reunion had been decidedly frosty on Foggy’s part and grimly blank on hers, but after a few days, it was as if they could read each other’s minds when it came to Matt. “How unexpected.”

“Spanish flag!” the sailor shouted down.

“Zwounds,” muttered Natasha, and Foggy’s heart sank. Even Matt’s impish face went serious as he tipped his head on one side. “What can you hear, Matthew?”

“One moment, my dove,” Matt said, and even as a galleon loomed upon them with its sixteen guns and the Rosaline with naught even a child’s sling-shot onboard, Foggy still found enough stores of attention to feel irritation at the endearment. “Aye, friends, we’ve been rumbled. They’ll be searching vessels for the suddenly disappeared Lord and Lady Vella, who have spread amongst the Maltese nobility some most scurrilous rumours about the Spanish king’s intentions regarding trade.”

“To be fair, we were being very scurrilous,” Natasha remarked.

Foggy shaded his eyes and tried to discern the Spanish ship’s size and her draught. She was big and weighed down with gunnery, and slow as a bear. “We can outrun them.”

“You’ll never sail again,” Natasha said, shaking her head. “The Rosaline will be marked as a spy-carrier and turned away at every port, and that is if Spanish operatives don’t murder you in your mamma’s cottage in Southwark.”

“How do you know she lives in—never mind, how will they know this ship from any other that sails?”

“English flag, Barbary-style rigging, and your hull is as lumpy as a prick with the pox,” she sniffed, and Matt smothered a horrified “Jaysus,” behind his hand.

“I beg your fucking pardon!” One of the sailors, coiling rope nearby, barked.

“You are fucking pardoned,” Foggy snapped, glaring and holding up a forestalling hand at the insulted sailor. “Man your post and shut your mouth.” He turned back to Natasha. “Keep a civil tongue about my ship lest you find yourself swimming back to England.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sure she has a heart of gold, though it will matter not when she is torched,” Natasha said, eyes wide and innocent. “She cuts a very fine, _highly recognizable_ figure, Captain."

“Fine,” Foggy grimaced. “What are you orders, my Lady?”

“How near is that galleon?”

“Three leagues now, and less every moment.” They’d loomed close in the minutes the three of them had spent arguing. Foggy could count the men on board the ship, and they were all large, and armed, and unamused.

Natasha nodded, looped her arm through Foggy’s, and strolled him to the quarterdeck. “When you are boarded, do nothing different,” she advised gravely, straightening his jerkin and cap. “You carry cargo that you yourself could never afford, you can never work fast enough to please your employer, and your men are ungrateful wretches. Now some foreign brute who seeks two fools you’ve never even heard of has gotten his head so far up his arse as to think you have even a moment to spare dallying with spies. How could your work day be ruined further?”

Foggy breathed deep and nodded. He could whine and complain to save Matt’s life. “And the men? They know you to be other than what you are.”

“Men will be men—they can say whatever they want,” Natasha said, and winked. “Matthew,” she called over the deck.

“Aye!”

“We’ll run a blanket con.”

The eager little moan Matt made—as though someone had brought the most delicious food in Christendom and flourished it upon upon a fine table set just for him—sent a thrill down Foggy’s spine, and even as Spanish marines tromped onboard his deck, he was not completely sure if it was dread, or panic, or lust.

“I am already behind schedule,” Foggy said instead of greeting the Spanish lieutenant, as he straightened up from a polite bow. “Do me the kindness, sir, of a swift search.”

“How do you know why we are here?” The lieutenant’s eye’s narrowed.

“I don’t,” Foggy sighed, already distracted with reaching for the wheel and adjusting it minutely. “But you are not pirates and you are not excise-men and you are not a ship full of prostitutes and as I have already vouchsafed, I am behind schedule so please get underway.”

The lieutenant smiled mirthlessly. “I search for a man and a woman who style themselves as citizens of Malta but are liars in fact. You will accompany me as we search.”

“What a blessing,” Foggy muttered. Four marines flanked him as he tailed the lieutenant through the Rosaline’s cargo holds, along her decks and through her narrow passageways, so he kept his eyes forward and his hands loose at his side when all he wanted was to dig his nails into his palms. He knew not where Natasha and Matt had secreted themselves, but he knew that this was on purpose, so he did not give them away with his fear. So he huffed and sighed and muttered to cover his pounding heart as doors were flung open and sacks of grain were run through.

“There is no place else to look, my Master,” Foggy said, his patience and nerves frayed at the end of an hour’s search. The Spanish marines were peering under railings and kicking at coils of rope, as if Matt and Natasha were small buttons that had been lost rather than two full-grown spies.

“No, there is one last place,” the lieutenant said, and marched up to the door of the captain’s cabin. He threw it open.

Light scythed into the small, dim chamber, and the first thing Foggy saw when he peered around the lieutenant was a woman’s bare shoulder peeking out of his hammock, her skin glowing in the sunlight.

“Oh sweet Christ in heaven,” he gasped quietly, and it was only partially at the pearly triangle of Natasha’s bare skin. His entire chambers were in outrage; charts and books flung about and all his clothes strewn in piles on the ground.

Natasha stirred and stretched and the marines that had crowded in behind Foggy were making pained noises from the bottom of their hearts, if their hearts were in their breeches. When her head lolled up, red hair mussed over her forehead and eyes soft from sleep, she frighted badly and hauled the blankets up to her chin.

“Captain, what’s happened? Who are these men?” she quavered, and Foggy twitched, because those were Matt’s vowels coming out of her mouth.

“Uhm, this is—” Foggy pointed.

“Teniente Alonso de Leiva,” the lieutenant bowed smartly. “Of the Armada Española”

“Moira,” Natasha said, bobbing her shoulders in a sort of sitting-down curtsey. “I’m the Captain’s, uhm” she smiled wryly and her cheeks reddened, “sister.”

“I see,” the lieutenant said, after a beat.

Suddenly, one of the piles of clothing of the ground started to sigh and shift. “Hush, some of us don’t recover so quickly,” Matt moaned, and a tree-trunk arm flung back one of Foggy’s cloaks. His shirt was still open to the navel and his skin was just like Natasha’s, glowing like milk in the sunlight. They looked like they had been poured from the same bucket of cream.

“God save me,” Foggy whispered, and one of the marines muttered that God would not want anything to do with his pox-ridden arse.

Natasha balled up some fabric—one of her stockings—and dropped it on Matt. “There are some men here, my heart,” she said, still grinning a disarmingly flustered grin.

“Tell them to come back when I can stand again, I’m worn out.” Matt said, brushing off the stocking and turning over. Suddenly there was an increased amount of glowing pale skin in the cabin as the cloak perfectly failed to cover Matt’s milky, round hindquarters and neatly framed the dimples above his arse. Foggy bit into his hand.

“He’s my…other brother,” Natasha giggled, as if that explained or excused anything about the stomach-dropping sight she and Matt made wrapped up in Foggy’s blankets

As he closed the chamber door, Tenient de Leiva cut his eyes at Foggy, and it was a look of mixed judgment and admiration the likes of which he had never seen. “Is this how you fell behind schedule, señor?”

“You know how it is,” Foggy said, laughing weakly. The lieutenant rolled his eyes, bowed stiffly, and signaled his men back to their galleon.

“Do you think every English captain gets two whores? Perhaps we should defect,” one marine was muttering to another, as they filed past Foggy, onto their enormous galleon, and sailed away.

Roland sidled up to Foggy and muttered, “we could hear the gasps from the bowsprit. What did they do?”

“I would tell you, but I honestly know not how to describe it,” Foggy said, and pushed back into the cabin, where Natasha was dressed and piling her hair back atop her head, and Matt—Foggy coughed and looked away—was still lounging on the floorboards, his shirt wide open and his bare legs poking out from under Foggy’s cloak. “What in God’s blessed name was that?” he demanded.

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “That was a blanket con.”

“Airing your shame to trick the enemy? That’s your idea of a plan?”

“They left, didn’t they?” Matt pointed out.

Foggy pointed an agitated finger at him. “Don’t you dare speak to me while you’re not wearing breeches, Master Murdoch. I refuse to believe the Catholic Church looks kindly on… on…strategic arse-display!”

There was the sound of a snorting snigger, like air escaping from a hole in a bladder, but when Foggy looked at Natasha, her face was serene as a pond.

“Depends on who sees it, I expect,” Matt said blithely. He gathered the cloak around his waist and started to feel about for his clothing.

“This from a man who didn’t even know what could happen between two men and a sack of lentils,” Foggy muttered as he prodded a pile with his toe till he found Matt’s hose. Matt caught it out of the air and wriggled into them before tossing the cloak away.

“Of course I didn’t! I'm a good Catholic boy,” he smirked, pulling on his jerkin. “But from one travelling man to another, sweet Captain, the world is full of wonders for any boy—even a Catholic one—who is willing simply to listen.” This last was said with a soft voice and a close lean.

Foggy cleared his throat and looked away again.

“Captain,” Roland stuck his head into the cabin. “There’s a wee longboat coming aft of us.”

“Ah, that shall be Peter, our ferryman,” Natasha said, drawing the hood of her cloak over her hair. “Thank you, Roly.”

“You’re leaving?” Foggy yelped. “You’re leaving…out my window.”

Natasha paused in the act of hitching up her skirts and hopped down from the windowsill. She gave Foggy a blank stare, as if she simply could not divine his objection, and then curtseyed. “I thank you for safe passage, Captain,” she said politely, then planted her foot on the lid of Foggy’s sea chest and launched herself into the sea.

“Aye,” Matt said warmly, and slapped his back. “Our thanks, my friend.”

Foggy frowned, for this was not the man who had twined his arms about Foggy and called him his dove. The day had started aggravating and had only worsened, and yes, he had taken some of his frustration out on his oldest and dearest friend, but had he truly shouted so much as to strangle Matt’s affections—if he had any—in the cradle?

“It was my pleasure,” Foggy lied. “Will I see you again?” he blurted, and then grimaced at the floor.

Matt, already half way out, leaned his head and shoulders back in and slipped his hand into Foggy’s. He raised Foggy’s hand to his lips with a soft, mischievous grin. “Aye, I expect you will.”

***

Later that year, at the Gull and Garter, there was a letter from Matt. Foggy broke the seal and spread it out eagerly on the tavern’s worn table. It was scribed in the hand of Lady Natasha, and it told Foggy that anything sent in correspondence to her, anywhere in the world, would find its way to Matt.

In a fit of unforgivable pique, Foggy crumpled the letter and made to throw it into the fire, but realized that would most likely condemn him to return to a life without even a way to get a message to Matt. He folded up the road-dusty paper and tucked it in the back of the book of navigation he kept in his satchel like other men kept bibles.

For a year, Matt crisscrossed the known world, and Natasha sent word on his behalf to the Gull and Garter. Most notes were months old and only bore the information of a place and a date. Bohemia in January. Prussia in Spring. Rome, on Michaelmas tide. Foggy wondered if, in all of these places, Natasha remained by his side, or if she was the one to bid him go, like Mistress Gaiman bade Foggy cross the waters of Europe for the good of her and her company.

Although Foggy no longer booked his voyages back to back as he did before, being Captain he was obliged to set up a temporary office in some or another city when the negotiations were going poorly or if his shipments failed to meet him on time. He tried to send word to Matt when he knew he was to settle in Europe for a time, but their paths never crossed. What Foggy would not have given for a bird that could take his thoughts and whisper them directly into Matt’s ear.

In one of those makeshift offices in the city of—by God, Foggy could no longer remember—he was whiling away the days with wine that a merchant had sent to placate him over a ship that was delayed, and he dipped his quill too much in his drunkenness and spilled his folly all over a ream of parchment. He told Matt about buying daisies for their cottage, and how every flash of red hair made his heart leap like a dog hearing the footsteps its master. He sealed the letter with a shaky hand and called for a servant to take the letter to a messenger before Foggy emptied the bottle down his gullet and fell asleep on the rug next to his desk.

The next morning, the servant said that the messengers had already departed, and Foggy could only pray that the letter would be lost, or trampled, or eaten by a whale. Or that when Natasha received it she would be so disgusted as to hurl it into the fire.

For a long time after that, there was no word from Matt at all.

***

“Captain? Captain?” Roland shook Foggy’s shoulder hesitantly.

“Sod off,” Foggy mumbled into his hammock, certain that he had closed his eyes not a quarter of an hour before. Candle-light pierced his tired eyelids and he swore.

“Captain, you’re needed on deck. I’m afeared Young Greville may start crying again.”

Foggy rolled over in his hammock and blinked up at his second mate accusingly. Roland grimaced at him and shrugged apologetically.

“By God, Roly, you look old in this light,” Foggy sighed.

“I’m nearly five and twenty, Caulfat,” Roland said as Foggy shoved his legs into his breeches and hopped—it wasn’t a tumble—out of the hammock. “And you have none of the look of a dew-kissed spring rosebud neither.”

“I liked you better when you giggled,” Foggy shot back, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Now let us go find out what our first mate has done to my ship in the pinch of hourglass sand I have been asleep,” he said, and pulled on his cap.

"This is what you get for agreeing to take on a toff’s arseheaded son,” Roland said darkly as he lit the way up to the deck. “Nineteen is too young to first a crew, and he’s had fewer hours onboard a boat all together than I’ve had sat on a privy seat.”

“And how would we undertake any trading with a mast bare as a maypole in January? One replacement sail, one son trained up as first mate, be he ever so arseheaded. That was the bargain.”

“And the nervous weeping?”

“Not part of the bargain, no,” Foggy sighed, wrapped his jerkin around him closer, and yawned. He had been dreaming of Matt.

When Foggy trudged up to the quarterdeck, Young Greville’s eyes were shining in the lamplight and his chin wobbling.

“Alright, my lad, what went awry?” he asked patiently.

“I lost the bearing, Captain,” Greville said, lips curved down unhappily, “and I have not yet re-found it.”

“Do you think you can?”

“It’s been near quarter of an hour,” Roland muttered.

“Quiet, sailor,” Foggy said sharply, then turned back to his young first mate.

“Thomas. Can you find it again?” Greville looked at Roland, who was making frustrated noises, squared his shoulders and nodded. “Alright, master Greville, find me a bearing.”

Roland and Foggy leaned against the side of the ship as young Greville toiled away with a sextant and his star-charts lit by lamplight.

“We’re never getting to Bremen,” Roland moaned into his palms, as Greville checked for the North Star a sixth time.

“Hush, Roly,” Foggy yawned into his sleeve. “We’re drifting in the right direction at least. The lad will find his bearing and we’ll drop canvas. Bremen will be there when we get there.”

“My wife grows heavier daily, and I would like to be home to see my child before they have children of their own.”

“Child?” Foggy smacked Roland in the arm with the back of his hand. “You mentioned nothing of this, you bilgerat!”

“I only mention aught of it now so you will snatch the wheel from arsehead over there and speed up this damned ship,” grinned Roly.

“You’re the arsehead,” growled Foggy, and he approached young Greville with a reassuring expression painted on his face.

“Well, lad?”

“I think I have found it, Captain, but I feel I may be losing my wits.”

Roly snorted.

“Why’s that?” Foggy asked.

“I think,” Greville chuckled self-deprecatingly, “I thought I heard singing,”

“Is there something wrong with your nose, Roland?” Foggy demanded, when there was another snort.

“Nay, he is right to mock, tis folly, I know,” Greville said, and laughed again.

“Wait, hush,” Roland said. “If he goes mad, I may go with him.”

They listened to the night, and over the ush-ush-ush of the waves, he heard a voice raised in song, the sound made faint by the wind and by distance.

“What in God’s name?” The three sailors rushed to the aft and Greville raised the lamp. Attached to their hull—somehow—was a rope, and at the end of the rope was a dinghy, bobbing madly amid the waves. Sitting in the dinghy, looking completely untroubled by his circumstances....

“God’s teeth, is that the bloody troubadour?” Roland yelled.

Matt stopped strumming his lute and waved, “ahoy, Master Roland!”

Young Greville turned round, disconcerted eyes to his captain. “Is this normal?”

“There is no normal where he’s involved,” Foggy said, and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Come aboard, if thou canst!”

“A pleasure as always!” came the faint cry, and then Matt was shinning along the rope, a satchel and his lute upon his back and his walking stick clamped between his teeth.

“How did he...” Roland wondered, his hands making vague motions Foggy assumed meant “find us in open waters, come abaft of us, attach to us, and all of this while remaining unseen?”

“You tell me,” Foggy said acerbically.

“I was not on watch,” Roland protested.

Foggy glared poinyards at his sailor. “The lad’s had less time on a boat than you’ve had sat on a privy seat. What’s your excuse?”

“Good evening, my masters,” Matt said heartily, twirling his cane as his feet touched down lightly on the deck. “Or perhaps it’s good morning. What’s our destination?”

“Bremen,” Greville chirped, edging out from behind Roland and peering at the red-blindfolded troubadour like he was some sort of mystic beast.

“Tis unusual for a bucket boy to stand dog watch, is it not?” Matt asked.

“Matt, this is my first mate, Thomas Greville. He is young, but he is—very young. Greville, this is Master Murdoch, who’s convinced he can sing.”

“Oi, Sir!” Matt laughed. “First mate, ey? You serve aboard a good ship, my master, with a good crew. Now, if you will give me leave, I have sailed a great distance this eve—”

“ _We_ have sailed a great distance this eve. You clung on like a flea upon a dog’s back.”

“—and I must withdraw to the captain’s hammock. I bid you all adieu,” Matt said, and made a flourishing bow before tapping his cane towards the captain’s chambers.

Foggy felt twin incredulous gazes upon his back and he really did not want to turn around.

“Does—” Greville started, voice faint, “does Master Murdoch share your ha. Your ham—” his jaw worked soundlessly before he gave up on the word all together, “often?”

“And then some,” Roland said.

“Quiet,” Foggy ordered, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Not a word more. Master Greville, get back to the wheel and take us to Bremen. Try not to collide with Denmark on the way.”

“Aye Captain,”

“Roland, stop smirking this instant and throw yourself overboard.”

“Right away, Captain,” Roland saluted and made not for the edge of the ship but followed Greville back to the quarterdeck, where he put his feet up on the railing and watched the young first mate go about the business of steering.

“I’m going back to bed,” Foggy said, to no one in particular.

In the captain’s cabin, Matt had made himself at home. His satchel and lute lay next to Foggy’s desk and his boots and jerkin were folded up neatly atop Foggy’s sea chest. Sighing, Foggy shucked down to his own smalls and approached the cozy-looking lump taking up most of the space in the hammock and certainly all of the bedclothes.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t spin you out of there,” Foggy said, pushing at Matt until there was room for him.

“I would hit my head and die and thou wouldst grieve,” Matt said, throwing an arm around Foggy’s middle.

“You flatter yourself, troubadour.”

“I never need to, Captain,” Matt yawned. “Natasha sends her love.”

“Her what?”

“Her love. Or something similar.”

Foggy huffed a disbelieving laugh. An answering chuckle, warm and sweet, puffed over the back of his neck.

“Matt, what are you doing here, truly?” Foggy asked, just on the edge of sleep.

“You wrote to me, sweetling,” Matt said, rolling nearly on top of Foggy and kissing his face. “Were I made of stone I would still come and find thee.”

“Oh, Lord. I was in my cups that night.”

“Aye, Natasha did say your handwriting was abominable. She could scarce keep from snorting with laughter as she read it to me. Now quiet yourself, we’ll need our energy in Bremen.”

Foggy tried to work up an appropriate measure of outrage when he said “we?” but he just sounded drowsy and contented, so he held still for one more of Matt’s kisses, and fell asleep.

***

The next morning, Foggy awoke cold, achy from shallow sleep, and alone. He threw his jerkin over his sleepshirt and stuffed the tails into his breeches. When he went on deck, there was the jagged border a seaport on the horizon, the points of towers and bridges barely pushing through the layer of haze.

“Well navigated, Master Greville,” he told the first mate, “it appears we did not bump into Denmark.”

“Thank you Captain,” Greville beamed. “Oh, Master Murdoch departed, and said that he would return ere we leave for London. He said to say farewell.” He nodded smartly at a message well-relayed, and Foggy blinked at him.

“Departed?” he screeched, and waved his arms at the miles of open ocean surrounding the ship. “At what way-station?”

“Another boat came up alongside in the night.” Greville said.

“Fucking hellfire and purgatory, not again,” Foggy said into his hands. Greville twitched. “And you thought that so unremarkable you didn’t think to wake me?”

“You said there was no normal where he was involved!”

Foggy pinched his own thigh to keep from calling his young first mate a credulous nitwit. “In the coming years,” he said, ferociously evenly, “I advise you to tell your captain if his guest seeks to depart for another ship—who should not have known we were here, I might add—in the middle of the night.”

“Master Murdoch said not to disturb you.”

“Master Murdoch is not the captain!” Foggy said angrily, and stomped back to his cabin where he could have his feelings of abandonment in private.

This is how the lasses in all the ballads must have felt when their swains disappeared and they were left ruined and alone in the harsh light of day. Up upon the deck, he heard one of the hands shout notice that they were entering the mouth of the river.

Foggy bundled himself up and sat behind his desk in a bilious sulk, contemplating ordering Greville to take them to another port so that Matt would wait upon the riverbank for a ship that would not come.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: a character is threatened with execution and there are mentions of blood.

“This is why I became a sailor,” Foggy said, as he was being tied to a tree. “Nothing good happens on land.”

“Before you ask,” Roland said to Greville, likewise being bound, “this is not normal either.”

“I surmised that, Master,” Greville answered, lifting his lashed-together arms so that the filthy, skinny, pitiful-looking highwayman could get the rope around his middle.

“Quiet,” the head highwayman barked.

“Oh make me,” Greville spat, which made Foggy and Roland gawp at the usually terrified young man in horrified fascination. The ruffian waved a rough blade—really, nothing more than a piece of metal beaten into something resembling a pike’s point—under Greville’s chin, and the first mate simply curled his lip in defiance. In the three months that Foggy had known him, Greville had burst into tears when Foggy had asked a challenging question, when he lost the ship’s position on the map, and once, memorably, when the ship’s cook said there was no more fresh milk.

“Brave boy,” their captor said, in accented English. “Brave and not so smart, perhaps.” He tapped Greville on the cheek with the flat of his blade.

“I think he likes you,” Foggy said, faintly, and because what else was there to say. “You are holding up, um.”

“Bafflingly? Bizarrely? Illogically?” Roland supplied.

“Admirably well,” Foggy finished.

“I may be as useful onboard a ship as tits on a bull,” Greville sighed. “But grammar school does give a boy the ability to deal with bullies when they tie him to a tree.”

Foggy and Roland exchanged horrified looks.

“Quiet,” the head captor shouted again. Foggy was going to call him Johann.

“My good Master,” Foggy said, bowing as well as the ropes would let him, “you see that we are but simple traders with no money of our own. You are welcome to our supplies, such as they are. But if that cargo is not delivered to Friherre von Friesendorf, he will take it out of my hide.”

“Yes, we are familiar with, as you say, Friherre von Friesendorf taking out of men’s hides,” Johann said bitterly. “You see this countryside, how poor it is, how barren? It was not so before. The Friherre did this. He plowed the fields into dust and starved us all to the bone, so we take.” Johann crossed his arms and tapped his knife on his bicep. “We take your woods—”

“It’s called lumber,” Greville said snidely, and Roland strained against his ropes to kick the lad silent, but Johann tipped his head graciously.

“We take your lumber, and we take the people’s grain the Friherre means to pay you with, and maybe, this winter, no one dies from the cold and the hunger.”

Foggy looked at the ground. He’d never met the Friherre in person. Mistress Gaiman hadn’t either. But they had met his pencil-thin, miserly agent who had looked at Foggy and the Rosaline with pinched-mouth disgust, as if she hauled animal waste rather than some of the finest goods seen on either side of the Channel. And in Foggy’s experience, vile servants have masters to match. The villager, Johann, was skeletal, and sallow, and his head was bald in patches, and none of his men looked healthier than him. Foggy hated to imagine what the women and the children looked like.

“Let us deliver the lumber,” Foggy pleaded. “And we will share the grain with you.” Greville and Roland shouted their objection but Foggy hissed at them to be quiet. “I promise I will do this.”

“I believe you,” Johann said, shaking his head. “But why give my children half a meal when I can give them a whole one?”

Behind Johann, one of the highwaymen, the one with sunken cheeks and eyes so angry they glowed like coals, snapped something bitterly.

“Enough talk, we should just kill them now,” Greville translated tonelessly.

All the men were nodding agreement. Some were drawing out their knives.

“You are a sympathetic man,” Johann said to Foggy, “I see this. You would help if you could. But you cannot. The Friherre has assured this, and your British master has assured this by doing business with him also. So you must die, so we can live.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Foggy said, desperation clawing up his chest, “I think we can work together. The Friherre is a bastard, that much is clear. Keep the lumber, my master. Build yourself the finest, warmest dwellings for the winter. My employer, she is a Christian of good character and if you let me explain to her what I have seen and why I have returned with no profits, she will not trouble you, nor will she ever do business with Friherre von Friesendorf again. I promise you this.”

“The Friherre takes food out of the mouths of his villagers to make more beautiful his castle. He is not the only one,” Johann said, shaking his head sadly. “Until they see how we suffer, no merchant is safe here. If you wish, I will spare the young one.”

“You piece of shit,” Roland roared, and struggled in his bonds. One of the men hit him with the back of his hand. “Don’t listen to them, Captain, please.”

“The young one. And the loud one,” Foggy said after a long pause, giving Roland’s smacked-arse face a sad smile. “They both leave safely.”

“If I do this, your life is—verwirkt.”

“Forfeited,” Greville supplied tremulously.

“Yes,” Foggy croaked. “I thank you.”

“Captain, no!” Roland shouted.

“You will shut your mouth this instant,” Foggy ordered. “You will report back to London. You will tell Mistress Gaiman what happened. And if you can manage it, I ask you to send word to Master Murdoch, though I know not where he is.”

Johann coughed into his sleeve—the spittle stained it pink—and started to saw at the ropes. “Come along,” he said gruffly, “we will not be cruel, it will be fast.” He retied Foggy’s hands behind his back.

“Do not let them watch,” Foggy pleaded.

Johann nodded and jerked his head at one of the other highwaymen with a muttered order. Distantly, Foggy heard Greville and Roland shouting and fighting as they were dragged out of the clearing.

The man Foggy had noted earlier—the one with the angry glowing eyes—approached Foggy with his sword unsheathed. “How would you like it?” he asked, in thickly accented English. “On your knees, or on your feet?”

“I’d like it not at all,” Foggy said, far more stoutly than he felt, staring into the eyes of a man who had been desperate and furious and hungry for so long that pain—his and others— no longer meant anything to him. The man with the coals for eyes took the front of Foggy’s jerkin in his fist and rammed the pommel of his sword into Foggy’s cheekbone repeatedly. A Foggy’s vision went yellow and wavering, and he fell to his knees.

“Funny,” the man spat, and drew back his sword.

At least his sailors were safe. At least Mistress Gaiman would know what happened to this mission and would take care of his crew. At least he had seen Matt that last time, Foggy thought. At least he would die with the memory of laying together in the hammock like lovers, the phantom touch of Matt’s cheek pressed to his. Foggy squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the sword to fall.

“Lavender blue, dilly dilly, lavender green...”

For a long, long time, all Foggy could hear was the sound of his own breath, noisy and slow. But from far away came the sound of a man singing. It came closer and closer.

“If I were king, dilly dilly, you’d be my...”

Foggy opened his eyes. There was a man strolling into the clearing, humming to himself and singing snatches of ballads in between unseemly crunching bites into the apple he held in his hand.

“Just some beggar,” Johann snapped at Foggy’s executioner. “Proceed.”

“Is there someone there?” the erstwhile balladeer asked, swishing through the air with his walking stick. It brushed the shins of one of the highwaymen. “Oh! Guten abend.”

“God’s love, get away from here, Matt,” Foggy gasped, but his throat was so dry he made no sound at all.

Some of the men started shouting at Matt in German, and he recoiled. But when one of them grabbed at his cane, the half-eaten apple went flying in a graceful arc as the fingers of his other hand shot into the soft part of the attacker’s throat.

“Matt!” Foggy screamed, and rolled away from the executioner’s sword. The man with coals for eyes kicked at him ineffectually but then Matt was bearing down on him, cane clashing against sword. Again and again the sword arced high and fast and Foggy was sure Matt would be split all the way to his navel. Below Matt’s scarlet blindfold, his face was a grimace of concentration and fury, the expression hard as oak and half as forgiving.

Foggy’s heartbeat was a solid lump in his throat but he would not do Matt the dishonour of looking away, not at the moment of his death. But as the man with coals for eyes hacked and slashed, Matt seemed to know exactly where the blade would be. He danced back, then forward, around and around the thrusting sword-point like an acrobat. Wherever the blade was, Matt vacated it not a heartbeat before. Soon he was close enough to grip the man by the front of his jerkin and rain down blows with his clenched fist. He had tied strips of linen tied around his knuckles and when the man who had swung the sword at Foggy’s throat finally fell to the ground, the strips were red with blood.

Matt fell to his knees in front of Foggy. “Good day, my dove,” he said, running his big hands over Foggy’s face and shoulders, checking for injuries.

“Don’t you 'my dove’ me. You left without a single word of farewell!” Foggy said, then hung his head in embarrassment for sounding like his mother when his father was vexing her.

An expression of amusement crossed Matt’s face. “I left word with young Greville,” he said innocently, and ran his hands down Foggy’s arms to his bound wrists. “I can’t undo these ropes, sweetling, you’ll have to be patient just a moment more.”

Matt smiled reassuringly as he spoke, and Foggy marveled again at how a face could reach such extremes of stoniness and softness.

There were three men on Matt, fists and swords and daggers against a slender walking stick, and Foggy blinked. He blinked again, and then once more. Matt, who should have died a hundred times over, was knocking the highwaymen to the ground like a boules ball through a line of skittles.

He moved not like a blind man but he moved not like a man with sight either. He moved better than a man with sight. He moved like a man who had something better than sight.

As Foggy stared at the flashing of Matt’s limbs, the way he seemed to swing from invisible ropes and push off invisible walls, something tangled in his hair and made his head snap back, and suddenly Johann’s dagger was tucked up under his chin. “Where is your sympathy now, Captain? Stop what you are doing,” Johann ordered Matt, who froze and threw the unconscious form of one of the highwaymen to the ground. Blood was dripping from the stained linen wraps down along the tips of his fingers.

“A clever ruse, playing the blind man to put your enemies at ease,” Johann accused.

“Indeed,” Matt said sourly. “Do you feel at ease, herr?”

“With my arm around your friend here, I do very much.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Matt said, holding out a hand to Foggy. “I’ll lay down my life before I let him hurt you.”

“I’m not afraid,” croaked Foggy.

“Ah, so you are willing to let this one die for you, Captain?” Johann hissed against the side of Foggy’s face. “Is he less dear than your sailor compatriots?” He made a pleased sound as Matt’s brow wrinkled. “Yes, you witnessed not this sacrifice, blind man. Herr captain agreed to pay for his friends’ safety with his life. He looks less willing to pay for yours.”

Matt frowned, and spun the staff over his fingers like a juggler. “He’ll never have to,” he said, and then something extending swiftly from his hand through the air stunned Foggy into stillness, and Johann was knocked to the ground.

When he scrambled up with a snarl and lunged again, a cord materialized out of thin air and wrapped around Johann’s neck. He fell to the ground again, gasping and choking. The cord was taut like a leash, and its source was the walking stick that was in Matt’s outstretched hand.

Foggy blinked, and the cord slithered from around Johann’s throat and back to Matt.

“What sort of trickery is that?” Foggy demanded, when he could speak again. Matt grinned and twirled the stick. When he flicked his wrist, part of the stick detached itself and flew like an arrow, only to halt in mid-air and be withdrawn back to Matt’s hand by a tether. “Magic?”

“Machinery,” Matt said, cutting the ropes that bound his hands and pressing gentle fingertips to his bruised cheekbone.

At Foggy’s feet, Johann was drawing in ragged, laboured breaths. He was too weak to turn over. “Kill me then,” he said dully. “It will mean more food for the children.”

“You stink of sickness, and you are not long for this world,” Matt said, pushing Johann down with his boot. “But I will hasten your departure if you ask.”

“Don’t kill him,” Foggy said, leaning heavily on Matt.

“He was a hairsbreadth from killing you, Foggy. He deserves no quarter,” Matt crouched, and flipped Johann’s dagger around in front of his nose.

“You can’t see him—I think,” Foggy hazarded. He’d seen Matt’s scarred eyes, knew him as blind, boy and man, but seeing him fight it was clear that God had given Matt some other gift that perhaps outshone normal sight as gold outshines iron. “He starves. His village starves.”

Matt growled, but he wrapped his hand around Johann’s bony wrist and his mouth pinched.

“I shall send a colleague of mine to help you,” Matt said, flipping the dagger one last time and stabbing deep into the turf a mere fingers breadth from Johann’s ear when he scoffed. The highwayman’s eyes went wide. “Listen well. You shall know her by her crimson hair and spider’s cunning.”

“And what will she do?”

Matt stood and dusted off his knees. “She will show the light of Christian charity to the Friherre. Whether he wants to see it or no.”

“A nun?” Johann snapped.

Matt made a genuinely surprised bark of laughter. “The Lady Natasha is many things, but a bride of the Lord? Nay.”

Around them, men were groaning and coming to. “Matt, perhaps we should just leave,” Foggy said uneasily.

“Listen to him,” a voice called.

When Foggy turned, Roland and Greville were standing in the clearing. Greville had lost his sleeve and Roland had a split lip but they were alive and gawking, their eyes were bulging at the masses of groaning men strewn about the ground like rose petals upon a bed. Next to them, slim and serene as a painting of the Madonna, was—

“Lady Natasha?” Foggy cried.

“Captain,” she curtsied. She had a sword slung over her shoulder. “Troubadour.”

“Reverend Mother,” Matt bowed, a smirk playing about his mouth. Foggy smacked him on the chest with the back of his hand because by the look of her casual, capable grip on the hilt, she was no stranger to swords. Matt chuckled, and stuck out his hand out to Johann. “Get up. Tend your men. This is the lady I spoke of. She will have the Friherr’s mind changed soon.”

“We cannot eat ‘soon’, blind man,” Johann snapped, but he bowed also to Natasha, stiffly.

“Keep the provisions we brought,” Foggy offered, swaying a little as the terror of nearly dying several times within one day coalesced into a feeling of cold being drawn up his body like a blanket. Distantly, he heard Greville offer further provisions from the ship, heard Roland protest mutteringly in a way that meant he did not truly object.

In Foggy’s wavering vision, Johann’s face was a disgruntled frown. “That would not help for long.”

“Take it or leave it, Johann,” Foggy snapped, trying to rub sight back into his eyes. “But for the good of all the children I nearly died for, I beg you to take it.”

“Who is Johann?” Matt asked.

Foggy pointed at the leader of the highwaymen.

“I am named Frederich,” Johann said, bewildered.

“Well, between tying me to a tree and attempting to execute me, you failed to introduce yourself,” Foggy said sharply. Matt patted his hair. “We are the ship called the Rosaline, berthed in the port of Bremerhaven. Give us till midday tomorrow to unfurnish ourselves of spare stores and prepare it for you.”

“I. Thank you,” Frederich said, a shade awkwardly.

“Very good,” Foggy said, striding an unsteady path back to his wagon. “Gentlemen, my Lady, I would like to leave.”

Natasha looked up from where she was conversing in fluent German with some of the highwaymen. “I shall stay for now. Can I trust you to send word to our employer?”

“Of course,” Matt said.

“Before you set about any—recreation?” she smirked.

Matt sniffed. “I shan’t dignify that with an answer.”

“That is answer enough,” Natasha sniffed in return.

“Uh, Captain?” Greville said, as Foggy pulled himself into the wagon box tiredly.

“What is it now, boy?”

“We have yet to deliver the lumber.”

Foggy twisted around in the seat and stared at a wagonload of planks. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” he moaned.

“That was proper Catholic of ye,” Matt said approvingly.

“I beg your pardon!” Greville huffed.

“Shut up, the pair of you,” Foggy grumbled. “Alright, we’re going to the castle. We’ll give Frederich half the grain tomorrow. I want shot of this place.” Roland and Greville climbed on at the back of the wagon and Matt took the seat next to Foggy.

“I don’t see why you’re come along,” Foggy said.

“Because I am excellent company,” Matt said, grinning and resting his chin on Foggy’s shoulder. Harrumphing, Foggy flicked the reins irritably.

“And as what should I introduce you? My bookkeeper?”

“Aye, that’ll work, I can count fiercely well.”

“You vanish into thin air fiercely well. And now, the one time I would have you disappear, you do not,” Foggy growled, and flicked the reins again.

“You’re still angry about that? I told you I left word with Greville, didn’t I lad?” Matt called over his shoulder.

“He did, Captain!” answered Greville.

“No one likes an eavesdropper!” Foggy shouted, and Greville snickered. Matt’s big hand encircled the reins and pulled back. The horses tossed their heads and slowed to a stop. “Oh, what is it now?” 

Matt laid gentle, red-stained fingers on Foggy’s chin. “If you would truly have me vanish from sight, I would oblige,” he said softly. Foggy snorted and pulled away, but Matt held tight to the reins. “What troubles thee, my dove?”

Foggy felt the corners of his lips turn down, so he pressed them together so he would not have the look of a sulking child. It mattered not that Matt would not see his face, it was the principle of the thing.

“Men who kiss me by moonlight and vanish by the dawn are either sprites or scoundrels,” he muttered, and prayed that Roland and Greville would not hear.

“Well, I know I am no sprite. Do you think me a scoundrel?” Matt asked.

“Only when thy mouth is moving,” Foggy said, trying to unfix his eyes from that same mouth that was curving into a mischievous smile.

“Protesting the charge will be met with no quarter, tis clear,” Matt said, tweaking the ends of Foggy’s hair and leaning close, “but if I be named scoundrel, let at least the moving of my mouth please thee.”

Then Matt’s lips were pressing gently to Foggy’s, the kiss soft as spring grass and sweet as honeysuckle.

“This is all very romantic,” a voice said, acerbically, from the back of the wagon, “But can we perhaps move this along?”

Foggy shot an evil glance at Roland, who was glaring back unrepentant but amused. Greville had his cap pulled over his eyes, and beneath it, his face was red as a cherry. Matt was stifling laughter.

“He demands to be kissed by daylight, Roly. Tis a matter of honour that I oblige," Matt said, and Greville pulled his cap even lower with a muttered “Oh dear lord.”

“I hate all of you,” Foggy said, but he sounded entirely too affectionate, and so he flicked the reins again.

***

When they got to the castle, Clapmarius, the Friherre’s agent, screwed up his nose at Foggy, at the men, and at the lumber.

“The quality is...questionable,” he sniffed, his fussy little moustache twitching.

“It is the finest Scots pine, herr,” Foggy sighed, unutterably tired.

“Call out your carpenters if you doubt it,” Matt called, who was lounging in the wagon box and munching on an apple that he had produced from God knows where.

The carpenters, when they saw the lumber, went into raptures. Clapmarius screwed up his nose some more—any further it would retract into his face altogether—and paid Matt not another scrap of attention as he showed Greville and Roland to the granary and apologized without any genuine feeling whatsoever that there were no men to load the payment onto the wagon.

“Cheers, mate,” Roland muttered under his breath as he heaved a sack onto his shoulder.

Foggy let Roland drive the wagon back to the docks where the ship was berthing, but he and Greville kept shooting him increasingly worried glances as he twisted his cap between his hands and met questions with only the briefest of answers. He felt itchy all over his body, like he had salt inside his clothing, and he realized he was continuously rubbing his mouth. Matt lounged on the sacks and continued to eat his apple as they bumped and jostled along, and Foggy ran his eyes along Matt’s long legs because he couldn’t run his hands. As they trundled through the town, Matt jumped off the back of the wagon.

“I must get word to my employer,” Matt said. “Don’t leave without me!” he shouted as the wagon continued on.

It was nearly full dark by the time they returned to the ship, and Foggy was shaky from restraining whatever maddened feeling was slithering over his skin. “Direct the quartermaster to part with whatever tack and beer we can,” he ordered shortly. “I will speak with him in the morning if he objects.”

“Aye Captain,” Greville said, eyes large and concerned.

In his cabin, Foggy lit all his candles to drive away the gloom that seemed to pulse with the sound of his own heartbeat, noisy and slow and seeming to be his last. He threw his dirt-coated clothing into the corner and scrubbed at himself from a basin of cold water and stinging soap. He wanted the smell of Bremen’s soil and Johann’s blood and the stink of mortal dread off his skin, and he’d scrape it out with a blade if he had to.

Hours or perhaps moments later, Foggy heard the window ease open and then Matt’s walking stick clattered onto the wooden floorboards. The satchel thumped down next to it.

“How farest thee?” Matt’s voice was garbled as he hopped through the window with yet another apple clenched in his teeth.

“Still alive,” Foggy said, still feeling tight all along his back but at least he was clean.

“You’re shivering.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can hear it.” He tossed the apple from hand to hand.

“Soldiers boarded my ship,” Foggy said, and Matt fumbled the apple spectacularly, face going anxious. “So I decided to show them my naked behind to make them leave.”

Matt huffed a relieved laugh but he was blushing. “You mock me.”

“Nay,” Foggy said, surprised, “I never would.”

That made Matt laugh again. “You have my entire life. If you ceased now, I would not know it was you.”

“And is that your wish?” Foggy asked, drying his neck and stepping so close that Matt's buttons brushed his chest. “To have knowledge of me?”

Matt choked a startled sound and his palm skated up Foggy’s bare flank. It pleased Foggy to watch him trap a moan behind his bitten lip. “Bare as the day you were born.”

“Nay.” Foggy smirked, “I have my boots on still.” Matt made a desperate noise, and his fingertips dug into flesh briefly, before letting go entirely. “I didn’t say stop.”

Another moan, and then Matt’s hands were dragging over Foggy’s shoulders and down his back, kneading. His panting breath cooled the sweat and bathwater that clung to Foggy’s hairline. Foggy closed his eyes and inhaled the smell of worn leather as he laid his head on Matt’s shoulder. “By all the saints, these arms. I think you must be the fairest man in all Christendom.”

Foggy snorted. “After seeing you fight today, I thought that you must have been blessed with a gift better than sight, but not after that remark.”

“I am gifted in many areas,” Matt said, waggling his eyebrows, “and one of them is knowing that thou art as fair as the nightengale’s song.”

“Which area is that?” Foggy said, running his palm, fingers pointed downward, over the front of Matt’s jerkin until he reached the edge and grazed the fabric of his distended breeches. “This one?”

“God’s love, Foggy,” Matt groaned, head falling back. “Not even the mistresses of Venice have a tongue as filthy as you.”

Foggy took his hand away, and Matt’s face froze in the expression of a man who has just realized he has made a very large mistake.

“That sounds very much like a challenge, Master Murdoch,” Foggy said, and bent Matt’s head down for a kiss. Then he laughed, for Matt might brawl like the devil was fighting to get out of him, and he might smirk and simper knowingly like the whores and ruffians of the world told tales of his prowess, but he kissed like a fine gentleman’s most delicate son with his arm around a maiden for the first time. Foggy pushed him back with a snarl.

Above the scarlet blindfold, Matt’s eyebrows arched high in shock.

“I won’t be kissed thus,” Foggy said, grinning up at Matt. “Not if the kiss be as bland as porridge.”

“Bland!” Matt cried in outrage. “No one has complained ere now.”

Foggy laughed again, feeling like the sun was shining out of his very chest. “How dare you kiss me like some polite, pointless gentleman?” He leaned close and dragged his teeth along Matt’s jaw, eliciting a ragged groan. “Thou art Matthew Murdoch, thou art a spy and a rogue and a Catholic and I love thee desperately,” he bit at Matt’s slack mouth and tugged off his jerkin. “Fetch him out, your Lordship, for it is by him I would be kissed.”

Wordlessly, Matt took the back of Foggy’s hair into his fist, and kissed him like a storm at sea. Foggy clung and scratched and urged Matt with demands of _more, please Matt, more_ that came to fruition only as wild, incoherent gasps. “Foggy, what do you want?” Matt asked, breathing hard.

“When I close my eyes I see swords and daggers plunging towards my throat. I would not see that for a time.”

“Anything, my dove,” he said, nodding seriously, then he smirked and sunk to his knees.

Foggy pressed his fist to his teeth.

“You shiver again, darling,” Matt said. His mouth was shining red in the candlelight.

“Nay, you imagine it,” Foggy said, shivering.

“Ah perhaps,” Matt gripped Foggy’s hips and rubbed his beard all over Foggy’s belly. Foggy barely stoppered a girlish shriek. “Do I imagine this foul object pressed against my chin?”

“Nay, tis mine,” Foggy panted. “What do you purport to do with it?”

“I am a good Catholic boy,” Matt said, and his dimples winked. “I would surely know nothing of that.”

"Oh fucking hellfire,” Foggy groaned and bit his fist again. “I know you are lying but the thought of your tarnished innocence—I know not if that makes me grow more desirous or shrink entirely.”

“Trust me, Foggy, you have not shrunk one jot,” Matt chuckled, and before Foggy could answer, he turned his head and pressed his wet lips to the side of Foggy’s cock. Foggy’s breath came out as a ragged burble that died away completely as Matt’s pink tongue curled over the head.

“Please…”

“Do you burn for me, Captain?” he licked a long, maddening line and Foggy inhaled hard through his nose.

“Aye, Matt, I burn,” Foggy babbled as Matt held him still, straining and hovering over the precipice of his lips. “Hotter than hellfire, hotter than lightning strikes, I burn, sweet fucking hell, Matt would you please suck my cock!”

Foggy might have cringed at his vulgar words, but then Matt took him between his lips and there was no more air in the room for regret. Matt suckled him with more vigour than grace, making noises with his throat that put Foggy in mind of a clog in a pipe. But his hands swept over Foggy like waves on the shore, caressing and squeezing flesh, scratching gently and raising shivers along his skin.

Matt touched Foggy all over, his hips and buttocks and thighs and once up to pinch his nipples—almost choking when Foggy’s hips jerked forwards—and then Matt’s beautiful hands swept his red silk blindfold off and sent it drifting away.

When Foggy looked down, he nearly spent down Matt’s throat spurred by naught but the expression he saw there. Matt’s colourless eyes were turned heavenward and fluttering, the corners glistening with tears. He was straining to be ever nearer, to touch and press and merge, and the lines of his entire body were etched with yearning and hunger. Matt’s tongue and lips and throat might be the only things touched by Foggy’s cock, but every part of Matt’s body was being penetrated by the press of Foggy’s flesh into his.

Foggy couldn’t breathe. Saints dying in rapturous agonies belonged to Matt’s religion, not his, but if ever there were a convincing argument for the appeal of suffering ecstasies, no one would need to look beyond the martyr that knelt between his thighs.

Gasping, Matt pulled back and dragged his sleeve over his mouth. “You taste like heaven itself,” he murmured, and swiped at Foggy’s hip with the flat of his tongue. "Stay with me, Foggy. When we return to London, don’t make me leave.”

Foggy palmed Matt’s blushing cheek and opened his mouth to promise that the cottage with the heather could be easily gotten, and that Foggy would kick his next twenty missions to poor hapless Greville if Matt would but consent to stay.

Before he could answer though, there was a scratching at the door, like that of a shy dog or a mortified first mate. “Captain Nelson, sir?” Greville whispered. It was the whisper of someone who was trying to call out yet not be heard.

“Don’t answer,” Matt hissed.

“I’m the captain, you fool, and I must.” Foggy hissed back. “What is it?” he called, as Matt’s expression went sullen.

“There’s a gentleman here, sir, would like to see Master Murdoch.”

Matt rocked his face against Foggy’s chest emphatically. “I’m not here,” he mouthed.

Foggy rolled his eyes and batted at Matt’s head. “What gentleman? Quickly, Thomas, I’m indisposed,” he snapped, when Greville hesitated.

The lad who not six hours before had sassed a man holding a knife to his throat made a sound of loose-bowelled distress at Foggy’s impatience. “He declined to give his name, Captain,” he quavered.

Foggy rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Give me something, my lad.”

“He wears a patch over his eye,” he said. Matt groaned into Foggy’s chest.

“Thank you, Greville.”

“Most welcome,” Greville sighed. Now that the message had been relayed, he was the soul of relief. “Can I tell him that—”

“Master Murdoch is not here, I will relay the message,” Foggy harrumphed. Matt gave him a deeply unimpressed frown.

“Aye...sir,” Greville said gloomily. “I’ll tell the gentleman that.” Dragging footsteps marked Greville’s reluctant departure. Foggy felt briefly guilty but to be first mate was to shoulder any number of unpleasant tasks. The lad would have to learn.

Matt shoved back and groped around for his blindfold. “I should have known he would be here,” he grumbled.

“Who is it?” Foggy scooped up the loop of red silk and unknotted it before laying it over Matt’s hand. Matt handed it back distractedly.

“Tis Lord Fury,” Matt sighed, as Foggy brushed his hair back from his forehead and tied the silk around his head.

“What pain-addled mother would give her son such a burdensome name?” Foggy snorted, kissing the hollows of the blindfold where Matt’s eyes were. Beneath the silk, Matt’s eyelids fluttered.

“I sent word to him regarding the village Friesendorf, but I thought he had gone into the Bohemian territory. More fool I for hoping he would not know my thoughts before I think them.” Matt breathed the words onto Foggy’s mouth and then they were kissing again. “Foggy, I must go, I’m dead afeared he will kick down your door at any moment. He may already be in the room, I know not.” Matt said, pulling away regretfully and shrugging into his jerkin.

“I have eyes, sir, and I say he is not. He can wait on the shore till morning, for all I care.”

“With Fury, no man can trust his eyes. I must go.”

“You asked me not to leave, and now you do the same?” Foggy demanded.

Matt snorted frustratedly. “Aye, I must.”

Foggy felt some part of himself go still. His voice, when it emerged, was cold. “Very well. Hie your own arse back back to London, I’ll not wait upon thee.”

Matt groped for his arm and tried to embrace him again, but Foggy did not let himself be so moved. “I’m not trying to spite you, Foggy, my employer calls. You would leave if Mistress Gaiman sent for you,” Matt growled.

“Nay,” Foggy snapped, “not now, not with you here.” He bit a kiss onto Matt’s open mouth before shoving hard at his chest, making him stumble backwards. Silently, as Matt gawped, he opened his trunk and angrily shoving his arms and legs into fresh clothing.

“Fucking hellfire,” Matt clawed at his hair. “I must go. I am called,” he stated, and crossed the cabin in long strides before hauling Foggy close by his arm and kissing him fiercely, desperately. “You were the one who wanted to save the village. That is where I go, Foggy. I go to do what needs to be done.”

Foggy looked down. That was indeed something he wanted. He would not be parting with half his payment of grain and any hardtack and beer that the crew could spare if he felt otherwise. But he was growing older—nearer to thirty every year—and had God not kept him apart from Matt for long enough? “Aye,” he said at last.

“We are rovers and ramblers, thee and me,” Matt said softly, trailing his fingertips down Foggy’s cheek. “It cannot be helped. But I will come back to thee, Foggy, I promise.”

“How? I’m bound for England on the morning tide. Do you think to conclude your business in a single evening?”

Matt flashed a smile before pressing their lips together again. “Nay. As you say, I will hie my arse back to London on some other poor captain’s vessel. But once there, I will find thee. I’m very good at it.”

“Oh but you’re a conceited beast,” Foggy said fondly.

“Aye, tis taken thee years to realize that. Now come, my dove, wish me farewell and fair weather."

Huffing a wry laugh, Foggy retrieved Matt’s lute and satchel and thrust them into his arms. “Perish in a storm...”

Matt frowned.

“…and I shall beat thee to a pulp in the hereafter. Find me in London, rogue.”

“I shall. Now tell me you love me,” Matt said, slinging his gear.

Foggy crossed his arms. “Oh-ho, now you go too far. Who said aught about love?”

“You did. Desperately, was the word I think. You’ve said it once already, sweetling, you cannot unsay it now.”

“I can try,” Foggy muttered, but let Matt press warm kisses to the side of his face anyway before he bowed, blew one more kiss, and hopped out of the window.


	6. Chapter 6

After Bremen, Matt blew through London once, stopping only long enough to strum his lute for an evening at the Gull and Garter and push Foggy up against the outside of it afterwards.

“I’m to Denmark on the morning tide,” Matt had growled as Foggy’s fingers wriggled their way inside Matt’s hose. “Don’t be so dainty, there’s no one around.”

Foggy pulled Matt’s head down for a kiss. “How long?”

“A fortnight, no more. Will you be here?”

Foggy sighed through his nose. “Nay. Portugal.”

“Damnation. How long?”

“I know not. Mistress Gaiman has me going for some wine and vintners are slow-footed bastards.”

“Damnation,” Matt swore again.

Some of the desperate heat had gone out of the moment after that, but they tripped out of the lane with their arms around each other, Matt’s cane hefted over his shoulder, and their steps were wavering from drink and laughter. At one point, when he thought he couldn’t smile any longer or wider and surely a body would just split down the centre from joy, Foggy took off his cap, stood on his toes and shoved it down on to Matt’s head.

Matt looked startled for a moment, then knocked Foggy down to the muddy street with the force of his embrace, laughing uproariously and sucking sloppy, drunken kisses against Foggy’s neck.

“Would you take me in the street?” Foggy whispered, between hoots of laughter.

Matt groaned. “Would ye like that?”

People were laughing and pointing at the two lunatics rolling about on the muddy ground but they were but a stone’s throw from the tavern and it was no strange occurrence. Still, Foggy shoved Matt off and pulled him up. “Come along, you fool, we’ll be flattened by a cart,” he muttered in Matt’s ear as they crashed into each other. “I would be taken anywhere you saw fit to unbrace your leggings, so perhaps test me not tonight.” He threw his arm around Matt’s back and towed him towards the river. The sun would rise soon. “Now which poor captain has the task of ferrying you to Denmark? Isanove, was it?” he said cheerily.

Matt nodded dumbly, and let himself be led towards the docks.

The next time Foggy saw Matt was nearly three months later, when Foggy pushed open the door to his parents’ cottage, his satchel on his shoulder and a peeling sunburn all along his nose and cheekbones.

“Mamma,” he called, tossing the satchel onto a bench, “come look, the tide has washed some rubbish into the house.”

“Foggy, you’ve returned,” his mother cried, embracing him. “Oh my treasure, you look like something ought to be on your father’s block, what happened to your face?”

“They’ve not heard of clouds in Lisbon, I had no warning,” he joked, and let her fret over his reddened skin. “Are you well?”

“Aye, treasure. Very well. Come, Foggy, come greet our caller.”

“Of course mamma.” In the cottage’s tiny parlour, Matt was sitting politely between a stack of Foggy’s mother’s pots and a brace of rabbits. A handkerchief full of roasted chestnuts lay on the table before him.

“Oh.” Foggy squirmed, for he’d been at sea for months and Matt looked better than a mug of English ale and a good long sleep. “Good day, Master Murdoch, how kind of you to call upon my mother.”

Matt smirked as Foggy’s mamma withdrew to the larder behind the house to fetch some drink, and said “good day” and “I am most graciously received.” He mouthed the word “treasure” mockingly and got Foggy’s cap in his face for his trouble.

Grinning, Matt pinged a chestnut of Foggy’s forehead and then Foggy simply had no choice but march over there and poke Matt in the ear. The tussle that ensued was, truly, beneath the dignities of two grown men, Foggy thought, as Matt pulled at his hair. When Foggy dug his fingers into Matt’s ribs, the laugh it elicited was like a goose honking.

Foggy’s mamma returned with a bottle. “What mischief—” she started, narrow-eyed.

They both plastered on guileless smiles and unclasped each other. “Nothing,” they said in unison.

“Mmm-hmmm,” she said, filling Matt’s cup suspiciously.

Later, in the other chamber of the cottage, the chamber where Foggy’s parents and Foggy himself slept between his ocean voyages, Matt boxed him up against the wall and gripped his hair again. “I have been in London a month and you were not here.”

“Portugal,” panted Foggy in explanation, as Matt began to tongue his neck. “Vintners. Bastards, oh God, Matt don’t stop.”

“Spend the night with me,” Matt sucked the words onto Foggy’s skin.

Joy leaped in Foggy’s heart. “Where?”

“I’ve a room at the tavern,” Matt said, but his pained grimace showed that he was thinking the same thing as Foggy—too public by half, and likely as not the space in front of the fire would already be rented out. “What about your cabin on the ship?”

“Refitting. For the length of a fortnight.”

Matt groaned and dropped his head onto Foggy’s shoulder. “I leave for Bourgogne in three days.”

Foggy squeezed his eyes shut. “Very well,” he sighed.

“Forgive me, Foggy.”

As Foggy held Matt against him, and ran his fingers through Matt’s sunset-coloured hair, something was happening in his heart. It might have been a desire that Matt never again sound so defeated.

“I’ll be here when you return.” The words were out of his mouth before the thought was fully formed.

“Aye, I hope so.” Matt kissed him and tugged on the ends of Foggy’s hair, affectionately. “A month, the Lady Natasha thinks, no more. But I will try to return quickly.”

“No,” Foggy said slowly. “I think I mean that I shan’t sail till your return.”

Matt gave him a skeptical look through the scarlet blindfold. “Are you certain?

Foggy kissed him again. “I think I am.”

***

Lord Greville banged his fist on the table, and Foggy jumped. Roland jumped. Young Thomas Greville, his son, jumped.

Mistress Gaiman did not jump.

“The natural order will not be perverted,” Lord Greville said, levelling a threatening finger at Foggy and Mistress Gaiman in turn. “Thomas has been first mate for nigh on two years. In the absence of the Captain, the ship is his.”

“The Rosaline,” Mistress Gaiman said, “is owned by me and my company and operated by Captain Nelson these last three years. Respectfully, my Lord, you have no say in the matter of where she goes or who serves aboard her. Roland Buttle will captain her on her next journey and young Lord Greville will serve as first mate.”

Lord Greville slapped the table again. “My son is a gentleman and no peasant will usurp him.”

Foggy shared a dark look with Roland. It was strange how a common birth seemed nothing to be ashamed of until someone highborn was pointing out to you. “Master Buttle has been sailing with me since he was fourteen. That’s ten years, my Lord—”

“I can add,” Lord Greville snapped.

Foggy carried on as if there had been no interruption. “—and still, he will have ascended to a temporary captaincy faster than I, and faster than most men who sail out of these waters ever did.”

“Your son is a good sailor, my Lord” Mistress Gaiman said, her voice colourless and hard as ice. “But neither Captain Nelson nor I will put him in charge of a vessel while still in his apprenticeship.”

“Then you risk a great enemy in me,” Lord Greville snarled.

“For seventy-nine souls, I would risk a great deal more.”

Foggy blinked at Mistress Gaiman, wondering what had happened to her voice, but Lord Greville was not looking at her. His hard glare was pinned on his own son.

“That is how many sail aboard the Rosaline, father. That is how many men Captain Nelson, Second mate Buttle, and I, and above all Mistress Gaiman, must keep safe.” His voice was thin, but Foggy heard iron threaded through it, and judging by Roland’s small smile, he was not the only one.

“You have taken orders enough from a woman and these—water rats! God’s teeth, Thomas! You have always needed people to do things for you.”

“You would see me as a captain, and for that I am both gladdened and full of thanks. But listen well, Father—” and now, Lord Greville looked both startled and furious that anyone had the temerity to give him an order, “if by some madness, Mistress Gaiman and Captain Nelson were to acquiesce to you, my first act as captain would be one of abdication.”

“Thomas!”

“No one would be safe with me for a captain. It is my duty to obey you, father, but it is also my duty as first mate to fight against any force—or man— that would endanger my crew.” By the end, Thomas’ voice was was fierce and his father’s face was screwed up in belligerence.

“You will amount to nothing without that I lay my cloak ahead for your delicate feet,” Lord Greville declared, gathering his cape around himself huffily.

“I expect so,” Thomas sighed, and held open the door for his father.

“Good day, my Lord,” Mistress Gaiman said, and Roland and Foggy bowed. Lord Greville glowered, snatched the door out of his son’s hand, and slammed it.

The three remaining let the breath whoosh out of their lungs.

“Let’s not do that again,” Roland begged, forehead on the table. He was giggling nervously, and Foggy had been surprised he’d kept it in for the length of the encounter.

“By God, Nelson, you have brought nothing but trouble to my life.” Mistress Gaiman smoothed her hair with a shaky hand. She did it twice more.

“Lies, Mistress. Just last month I brought you four score and ten bolts of Ottoman silk.”

“Indeed, they have the merchants forming a queue at my door, you have my thanks.” She scribbled something in a ledger. “Must you take so much leave, my friend?” If she were a woman of weaker will, Foggy would have called that tone a wheedle.

He smiled at her. “It is time for a rest.”

“Hmmm.” She cast a measuring eye over him. “And do I work you so hard that you must rest for an entire year?”

“I may be a simple seafarer, Mistress, but I know how to avoid sailing into a trap. If I say aye, I am ungrateful. If I say nay, I am a layabout.” Foggy said sweetly. “Besides, you make Roland pale with worry that you trust him not.”

“Oh, truly, I quake,” Roland said, biting his nail distractedly. “Where to, your Grace? The Orient? The New World?”

“Newcastle,” Mistress Gaiman said, eyes on her ledger but lips twitching. Roland stifled a snort.

Foggy chuckled into his sleeve and then settled in as Mistress Gaiman and Roland hammered out the details, and when it was clear that Roly could hold his own in the planning, Foggy let his mind wander.

Years ago, when they were boys on the Mariah, Alfie and Wat used to sit together on one hammock. They didn’t always speak, and oft times one was mending some article of clothing while the other whittled or read or wrote a letter, but they were always together. It was common on board a ship; there was so little space that unless there was a true animosity, sailors were always pressed up against one another. But from his own hammock, Foggy would watch, and witness Alfie briefly curl his hand around Wat’s bare ankle, or Wat reach over Alfie’s lap and his hair would brush his lover’s chin.

Matt, as a boy, had been free with his touches. Matt, when he had come back into Foggy’s life, had been even more so, though it seemed what he really wanted was to provoke Foggy’s indignation. But the truth of the matter still was that Foggy had never been starved for his touch by chance or intent. What sense did it make now that he thirsted for it nonetheless, and ached to have somewhere other than the lane behind the Gull and Garter, or the Rosaline’s store-hold, or his mamma’s bedchamber to have his fill.

“Gentlemen, we’re through here.” Mistress Gaiman closed her ledger and stood. Foggy jumped to his feet, hoping he hadn’t looked too far away with the fairies. “Captain Buttle, I wish you fair weather.”

Roland bowed, a shyly delighted smile tucked behind his hand.

“Nelson.”

“Mistress?”

“Dinner, tomorrow,” she ordered.

Roland’s eyes popped open. Foggy felt his mouth opened and shut two or three times. She was a widow, that was true, and a rich one. Foggy could probably not do any better if that were his aim. He pasted on a thin smile. “I’m honoured, my lady, er—”

Mistress Gaiman rolled her eyes. “Business matters, I assure you.”

Foggy’s breath whooshed out of him. “Oh, well, in that case.”

“Are you sure, Mistress? His virtue can be easily swayed—I’ve seen it. Lookst you fetching in red?” Roland teased.

“Leave me, gentlemen,” she said, shaking her head. She smiled little, but that made her little smiles seem all the more bright. Foggy and Roland bowed, and pulled on their caps.

As they walked to the Gull and Garter, Roland muttered to himself and lobbed seemingly disconnected questions at Foggy. First a question about the rigging, then provisioning, then what he could eat in Newcastle and how to keep an advantage at the bargaining table.

“Calm down, Roly. You’ve been watching this for years, both Captain Gaiman and myself.”

“I wish you were coming with me.”

“I know, but I’m to settle here for a while.”

“With the troubadour?” Roland asked, in a tone of innocence.

“Nay, I know not where he is.”

“For the love of God, Caulfat, don’t cheapen our friendship like with lies.”

Foggy gave him a dark look. “Fine. He’s in France. Somewhere.”

“And when he returns? Don’t say you know not.”

“I truly don’t. What choices have I?”

“You have a year. Waste it not, my friend.”

Foggy huffed a small laugh and thought of Gaiman exhorting him to the same romantic action, years ago. “You sound like the Captain.”

“The Captain was far more patient with you. But what nonsense do I speak, waste all the time God gives you if you, why should I care?”

Foggy shoved him. “Shut your interfering mouth, Roly. I’ll not let the year slip by.”

“What will you do?” Roland said, knuckling his eye.

“I know not,” Foggy said blinking up at the sun. “Perhaps I shall find a house.”

***

“I shall never find a house,” Foggy moaned into his mother’s kitchen bench. Next to him, tankard in one hand and his eating knife held between his teeth, his father patted him on the back.

“There there,” he said, and sprayed crumbs.

“Every house I have seen has either been too large, or too narrow to lie down in. Or it was too far from anything civilized. Or it was on top of some foul business like tanning. One let the rain in and that sniveling lawyer’s clerk had the gall to ask for gold!”

“I still don’t see why you need a house, my treasure,” Foggy’s mamma sniffed, viciously pulling the innards out of a rabbit. “Are we so terrible to live with?”

“Nay, mamma.” They’d been over this probably ten times, and Foggy had given her every reason under the sun save the truth, but she had the stubbornness that God only blessed mothers with, and budged not an inch. “But I am a man grown.”

“Grown, aye, but married not,” she pointed a finger at him and blood dripped from the tip. “And unmarried children live with their mammas.”

“Father—”

“You are being too particular. London shan’t treat you like a fine gentleman just because of your savings,” Foggy's father said.

“I have spent nearly twenty years at sea, father, and it is not an easy life, though I love it. I have gold enough for this one comfort.” He crossed his arms on the table and propped his chin atop them. “I will search till I find something worthy of those twenty years.”

Foggy’s mamma split another rabbit down the belly and snorted something unconvinced.

It took Foggy another month before he handed a bag of gold to another rat-like lawyer’s clerk (honestly, had there been an Adam and Eve of rodents, from whose loins all clerks and scriveners sprung?) and dropped his satchel onto a dirt floor that was, now that the ink had dried on the contract, his. He touched the wall. His. He opened the window. His. He mounted the stairs that led to the bedchamber above. Each creak underfoot, those were his.

Something furry and feral scurried from across the floor and disappeared into a hole in the wall.

Foggy sighed. He guessed that was also his.

***

Matt was far more than a month in Bourgogne, and if Foggy did not have the new house to divert his attentions, he would surely have run mad. The house moved not, had no rigging, carried no cargo and required no bookkeepers, factors, or negotiators, and fed and housed but one man and not nearly four score. And yet Foggy’s evenings were more exhausted than any of the days he spent at sea as a captain and many he spent as a labouring ship’s hand.

He woke at dawn to draw water from the well, buy his beer and bread and rabbit and onions from the market traders, if it were a market day, collect the egg from his hen (he had named her Lady Marci), light the fire, sweep the dirt floor, scrub an arbitrary collection of vegetables to be put into the cracked iron pot his mother gave him and thrust into the fire, choke down the “soup” that tasted like a mouthful of the river, feed Lady Marci, haul more fresh water, sweep the dirt floor again, and then it would be noon.

At night, even if Foggy had worn himself out during the day, sleep was slow in coming. It had never been this difficult at sea, he thought the seventieth or eightieth time he rolled over in his cold bed and stared at the white oblong of moonlight that was draped over his knees.

It could have been because he never saw this much light inside his cabin aboard the ship. It could have been the absence of the gentle rocking of the waves under him. It could have been because his body was used to twenty years’ sleep in a hammock, what Matt had once called half a shroud and a bit of string.

Where Foggy’s home had been the waves, and the snapping of the sails, and what surely had to be ten thousand men around him if the sound of snoring were anything to go by, now he had four walls and a thatch roof. Glass for windows and a dirt floor. It was quieter, and warmer, and stiller than a ship, and smelled infinitely better, but Foggy felt as unsteady in it as in a dinghy bobbing in open water with no land in sight. And while he kept himself busy in the day, at night, the truth of it was there, no matter how many times he rolled to face the other way.

He had, like a small, wishful child, built a house made of twigs in the hope that some untamable creature would come live in it.

***

One night, when he had come home in the dark, too dampened by drink to truly feel the cold, Foggy pushed open his door. He was humming something half-remembered and jolly about a sea captain and a maiden so pale.

When he lit a candle, the flickering light stirred the gloom and cast shadows off a shape huddled in the corner.

“Shout and we’ll both die,” the figure said lowly, and raised its lowered head slightly. Breathing shakily, Foggy raised his candle to the figure. Light glinted of a pair of green eyes ringed by purple bruises.

“Lady Natasha?”

“Hush. Lower that candle.” Her voice was hoarse and flat. A minute later, there were angry shouts and running footsteps and—God’s teeth—the baying of a hunting dog.

“Who has done this to you?” he whispered dumbly, after the sounds of the pursuers faded.

“Ever the gentleman,” Natasha laughed quietly and showed him her knuckles. They were wrapped in bloody linen, like Matt’s had been that day he'd saved Foggy's life in the village of Friedendorf. “No one who did not receive it back tenfold. Have you any spirits?”

Foggy blinked. “Aye. Uh, will you sit, my Lady?” Natasha snorted quietly again, and lowered herself gingerly onto the bench. She was holding one of her arms close to her body. When he poured a tot of brandy into the cup and held it out, Lady Natasha grabbed the bottle and drank directly from the neck.

“So, um. Are you well?” She gave him a slippery, unimpressed look. “Aside from the obvious. May I—” he squinted at her blackened eyes, the way her shoulder was held high and tense which spoke of an injury at the joint, “be of some assistance?”

“I am Matthew’s wife, you know.” She took another drink from the bottle.

“He said you were not.”

“We were wed by some manner of holy man, in the Orient.”

Foggy’s heart seized. “What manner of holy man?”

“Tall. Spoke Japanese. It mattered not at the time. It was a ruse to gain the favour of the local baron.”

Foggy bit down on aspersions he could cast upon the people of the East and their heathen wedding vows. If he travelled too far down that road he would have to berate himself for cavorting with a Catholic. Not that he and Matt had gotten any real cavorting done since that night in the port of Bremerhaven. “Your wedding vows won’t stop your bleeding,” he told Natasha sourly and bade her show him her mangled shoulder.

“Not so much a gentleman, then?” When Foggy rolled his eyes and made impatient gestures, Natasha swigged from the bottle again, rose gracefully, and then threw her body against one of the beams that ran up the wall and held up the ceiling. There was a sickening crunch and she cried out softly as the joint reseated itself. “There.” She sat down again and adjusted her cloak.

“I’m going to be sick,” Foggy said faintly.

“Sip your brandy.”

Foggy did. “Now that you have doctored yourself, have you lodgings for the night?”

“Only the space in front of your fire, if you can spare it.” She began to unwind the linen wraps on her knuckles and splashed brandy on the cuts underneath, hissing slightly.

“Don’t be stupid, you shall take the bed,” Foggy said. Natasha raised her eyebrows. “I’ll sleep in front of the fire, soothe your nerves.”

“You could not jangle my nerves even if you tried,” she said, with an air of amusement. “I simply would not lay my head where Matthew Murdoch has been tumbled.”

A mouthful of brandy went up Foggy’s nose. “No tumbling! There’s been no tumbling! No one has been tumbled here since the Garden of Eden!” he coughed.

The Lady Natasha’s face went abruptly pitying. “Dear God, Foggy, there may be but one man who is worse at secrets than you and that is a certain blind balladeer we both know. Oh don’t pale so. I shan’t run to tell the King. The world is brutal and those of us with good things should care for them.” She stood and handed him the bottle, now only half as full as it was before. “Good night, Master Nelson.”

“Good night, Lady Natasha.”

The next morning, Foggy woke to the sound of bustling in the street and Natasha crouched nearly on top of him, trying to light the fire while Lady Marci pecked her repeatedly in the thigh. Natasha was struggling and swearing at the flint, the logs, the city, and the hen in turn.

“I can light the fire for you, my Lady,” Foggy said, still hoarse from sleep. He’d actually slept till the sun was well up. Perhaps he should entertain strange warrior women more often. Rubbing his face, he tried to take away her fire-makers before she made good on her threats of chicken soup.

“Nay, I can do it,” Natasha said, with defiance in her voice.

“You can’t just—” Foggy reached into the fireplace to rearrange the mountain of firewood into something more reasonable for burning within a city made almost entirely of timbers, all the while avoiding the sparks from the flint.

“I can light a fire, Foggy!”

Foggy dodged her elbow but nearly sat down hard on the chicken. When he tried to steady himself with Natasha’s shoulder, they went sprawling. Lady Marci marched away, squawking.

“Thou art gracefulness itself,” Natasha said acerbically.

“At least I’m no arsonist,” Foggy said, and spat her hair out of his mouth. “You would have burned down my house, setting a fire so large.”

Suddenly the door swung open. “Good morning, Treasure, I’ve brought you some parsnips—Oh!” Foggy’s mamma lifted her hand to her mouth.

Foggy and Natasha struggled to standing. “Mamma.” He gestured helplessly. “This is—”

The Lady Natasha curtsied. “I am Natalia, Mistress Anna.”

Foggy stared. Her Muscovite accent had entirely disappeared again, as it had when she’d named herself Moira and spoke like a long lost Murdoch daughter. This time, she sounded like she had grown up not far out of London’s square mile. Also, Foggy had never mentioned his mamma’s name to her.

Foggy’s mamma slapped her basket onto Foggy’s table and approached Natasha with narrowed eyes.

“Mamma, be calm,” Foggy put a hand out to forestall her but she batted it away.

She took Natasha by the chin, gently. “Who hit you, child? It wasn’t my son, was it?”

“Mother!”

“Hush! You can tell me, Natalia, I’ll set him straight, whoever he is.”

Natasha looked near overwhelmed by the protective brittleness in Foggy’s mamma’s voice, but she folded back the sleeve of her cloak to reveal her knuckles, swollen and scabbed.

“Ah,” Foggy’s mamma said blankly. Then she folded the sleeve down and patted Natasha’s hand. “Well done, child.” Natasha and his mamma shared a subtle but vicious look that worried him but also made him wish he could take both of them to sea in case there was ever again trouble. The man with coals for eyes would have pissed in his leggings.

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“Are you to be my son’s wife?”

Natasha jerked back. “Nay!”

“No wife! No one is wifing today!” Foggy yelped at the same time.

Foggy’s mamma rolled her eyes and proceeded to casually take over the cottage. She went about scrubbing the parsnips, tutting at Foggy’s attempts at drying herbs, and bringing out of her basket, to Foggy’s ravenous delight, a mutton shank. Soon there was a delicious meaty smell of real soup throughout the house.

“Will you not stay, mamma?” Foggy looked up from his soup bowl when she had started rattling the spoon around in the pot searching for the bone. She fished it out, wrapped it in a cloth and thrust it under the ribbon of her apron.

“Things to do, child. Things to do. What?” Foggy nodded at the faintly steaming bundle poking out at her waist. “Tis cold out.” Foggy and Natasha managed to keep their faces peaceable until Foggy's mamma had wrapped herself and the mutton shank in a shawl and walked out the door, waved through the window, and wended her way down the street, the smell of meat trailing her like a wake.

That evening, the soup was thick and rich from a long day on the fire, and they ate it again for supper.

“Forgive her for thinking you us betrothed, I pray you.”

“I wasn’t discomfited.”

“Oh, good. I would hate if that were to drive you away.”

Natasha gave him a look, and for a split second, Foggy though she appeared startled. “Do you intend to keep me?”

Foggy blushed. “I think you are like a bird. Too free to be truly kept. At least not by a person like me.”

“Do you intend to keep Matt?”

There was a crack that ran the length of the table, and Foggy dug his nail into it as Natasha regarded him coolly. “Matt is his own man, this was ever so.”

“A weak answer, Captain Nelson.”

“Well it’s the only one I have.” Foggy sat back and folded his arms. Natasha remained tall and poised in her chair, elegant as a statue. “If he returns, he returns. If he doesn’t, I have diversions enough,” he shrugged, though the words twanged fears in his heart that he tried not to think about.

“Then he is just a friend? A brother?”

“Those were not my words.”

“Nay, you pretended that you would care even less of a jot if he never returned, and you did it badly.”

“What of it? Do you come to London to renew your marriage vows with him, and parlay with your competition?”

Natasha’s face went blank as a wall at Foggy’s snapped accusation. “Are you my competition, Foggy? I thought Matt’s affections were but a diversion to you.”

“I never said that.”

She tipped her head on the other side, eyes giving nothing away. “Thank you for the soup. And the bed,” she said, and started to rise.

“You’re leaving?”

She looked back at Foggy and frowned, and he could tell that she was purposefully allowing him see the irritation she was feeling. Any other man would have been kept out of the chambers of her heart by a calm, glassy exterior.

“He would not disown you thus.”

Foggy was on his feet before he decided to be. “I have not disowned him!” he snapped. “And how do you know he has not? I could have married ten times over in the years that he is gone from my life, but did I? Look around you, mistress. Only a fool lays down gold for a house when he has no promise from anyone that he will not be alone in it.”

As quiet as a handkerchief dropping to the ground, Natasha took her seat again. She folded her hands in her lap but said nothing else.

“All we do is promise each other we will return,” Foggy sighed, hauling his seat under his rear again and splaying his elbows out on the table. “One of these days, he simply won’t return, and what am I to do with this place then?”

“A house cannot be sailed away from danger, nor can you strike the colours and pretend to be someone else entirely. It must stand and be known for its intentions, and so must the people within it.”

Foggy frowned, but couldn’t disagree with her. After all, hadn’t he felt like he’d built a monument to his unwise affections? Hadn’t the immovability of his four walls, the permanence and undeniability of his house as a symbol of his embarrassingly profound feelings, been the very thing that stole his sleep and peace of mind?

“Do you speak from experience, my Lady?”

“I do. Tis why I have never had a house,” she said severely, before rising again. “Good night, Captain,” she said, and mounted the stairs to the bedchamber without another word.

For Foggy, sleep was, again, a long time coming.

The next morning, in the pre-dawn gloom, Natasha shook him awake.

“Captain, I must depart. You should get in the bed before it cools.” She was wrapped in her blue cloak and her veil hid her black eyes.

“You’re leaving?” Foggy yawned. “But we still have soup.”

“Aye,” she gave him a tiny, teasing smirk that Foggy was beginning to recognize as closer to the truth than her polished serene smiles.

He was good at this part, the hasty farewell. “Then I wish you fair weather, my Lady.” He lit a candle, and the flame made Natasha’s green eyes glow.

“Thank you.” She made no move for the door.

Foggy stared at the candle until it made black spots dance before his eyes. “Will you return?” he gritted out, vaguely feeling like she had tricked him into asking.

“If allowed,” she said, with another little smirk, and Foggy suddenly understood. Being left was hard. Leaving, knowing that you would not be missed? That was harder. Foggy had always had his parents to welcome him back to London, even though they might not await him at the dock or really even notice his absence till he stood in their doorway. But they would still throw their arms around him when they saw him, rush out and buy meat for his meals, tiptoe around him in the mornings so that he could sleep off the exhaustion of months at sea. Natasha—and he guessed Matt too—might not have anything of the sort if he was not the one to give it to them.

“You don’t have to cage a bird to consider her kept. You can simply give her a comfortable place to rest whenever she passes by.” Foggy said, and kissed Natasha’s hand.

She nodded gracefully and took her leave, shutting the door silently behind her. Foggy was just about to think that perhaps his offer had not moved her, that he had been wrong in thinking that she was another lonely rover, but at the last moment, Natasha turned and waved hesitantly through the window before disappearing down the dark and empty street.

***

That year, the seasons’ changing from a lingering winter to the blooming of spring was swift and sudden, like God had opened a set of celestial curtains to let in the daylight, and soon Foggy was sleeping easily in a bedchamber that let in warm breezes and gentle, glowing sunsets. As the square of light that fell across his bed lost the last of its sunny warmth and became the grimy yellow of the torches in the street, Foggy lit a candle and placed it on the nightstand. He said his prayers quickly, tagging on a request that Matt would return soon. He also prayed, he hoped it was not blasphemous, that somehow the two of them—Catholic and Protestant, Irish and English, the pair of them only just avoiding the sin of sodomy through a lack of opportunity—might someday enjoy a love as long-lived as Foggy’s parents’, or Wat and Alfie's.

Months ago, when Natasha had lodged here, the bedchamber had been a bare room, with naught but the bed, Foggy’s sea-chest at the foot of it, and his satchel hung from a peg on the wall. Since then, he’d acquired a long bench for his clothing, and curtains for his windows, and these touches made the house seem more like a place for him, rather than a space that lay empty because Matt had not yet deigned to fill it.

Roly and young Greville had brought him trinkets from their voyage, and tiny figurines stood in a line along the edge of a shelf. Wat and Alfie, upon hearing that Foggy had put a root down on land like they had, had sent him a looking-glass the size of his palm. Foggy had almost dropped it in shock for he had never seen one outside of Venice, then he rushed to show his parents for they had never seen one at all.

In the middle of his bench lay his money chest and atop it, the indigo silk-lined coin pouch he’d been carrying nearly all his life. He wondered if Matt could still use the scent of it to find him.

After a few moments in bed, he threw the blanket back and stalked out of the bedchamber, where Lady Marci was screaming to be carried up the stairs. He had let her sleep up there during the frigid winter, and she had gotten a taste for it.

“Are you happy now?” he demanded, as Lady Marci bobbed her head and strode into her winter nest which was made of a pair of Foggy’s threadbare hose. She turned around three times, folded her legs and then tucked her head under her wing. “And a good night to you too, my Lady,” he said, shaking his head. At least she’d give him something to eat for breakfast in the morning.

He blew out the candle and pulled the quilt up to his chin, sighing with something that was almost contentedness, and tried to ignore the murmuring in the street. He shut his eyes and listened to the comforting burble of chicken snores and wished that the any of the times Matt had climbed into his hammock, he’d not been so prideful as to lie there like a plank. He’d had nigh on a year to imagine what a measure of softness could have gained him. If he had stretched his neck to the side, would Matt have kissed it? If he had curled into Matt’s chest, would Matt’s hands have been licensed to wander?

The murmuring was getting louder, and—it was being accompanied by music.

Hauling on a shirt over his loose sleeping breeches, Foggy pushed open his window and looked down at the street below.

He saw the red hair first, burnished by the torches burning at the crossroad, and then the red jerkin. When the serenader lifted his head, the slash of red silk over his eyes made Foggy’s yearning heart sing.

“Dear love, regard my grief,” the bard sang, “do not my suit disdain. Oh yield me some relief that I am with sorrow slain. These long seven years and more have I loved. Do thou my joys restore, fair darling pity me.”

Foggy should probably have balled up a pair of his stockings and thrown them down upon the bard’s head, but instead he simply rested his chin on his hand and his elbow on the windowsill and tried very hard not to laugh joyfully as Matt plucked at his lute and crooned words more romantic and earnest than he’d probably ever voiced in his entire life.

“While I live, I must love, so fancy urgeth me. My mind cannot remove, such is my constancy: my mind is nobly bent, though I of low degree. Fair darling, give consent to love and pity me.”

With a final sweet chord, the lingering last note died away.

“Good eve, thou rogue,” Foggy called down to the street. His voice was appallingly full of fondness, but Matt had come home and it was time to stop fighting that.

“Good eve, Captain,” Matt said, his face breathlessly handsome.

“What commotion is this?”

“Tis a commotion of love, Foggy,” Matt said.

“Are you sure? Tis equally likely to be a commotion of an overabundance of ale.”

“Nay, darling,” Matt’s face was tipped up towards Foggy’s window, and he slung his lute as if he meant to scale the trellis. “Tis nothing more but me, sober as a judge, come to court he who is the most fair and adored.”

Foggy couldn’t stop smiling at this beautiful man, making a fool of himself on a public road for Foggy’s enjoyment. “Are you sure you mean me, Matt, and not the Mistresses Boone?” He waved at the ladies who had poked their heads out of a neighbouring window, drawn by Matt’s caterwauling, and who were now giggling behind their hands.

“Good eve, my ladies,” Matt said tightly, bowing.

“Good evening,” they chorused, before shutting their window. “Why has thou never serenaded me?” one of the Mistresses Boone demanded of the other, as the sash thumped down. Matt tugged at his collar.

“You look well,” Foggy said conversationally, as Matt shifted and scuffed his feet in the dust.

“I—Thank you, I am,” he said, before rallying. “Come, you’ll not turn me away, will ye? Was not the song to your liking?”

“It was tolerable,” Foggy teased.

“Tolerable enough to gain entry into thy heart, and thy house?” Matt tried, smiling winningly and reaching up towards Foggy’s window, longing in every line of his body.

“Oh, that’s right, how did you find my house? Could you smell my indigo silk purse from Europe?”

Matt flung his arms down with a huff. “Christ on the cross. Ned at the tavern told me. I’ve been sailing for a month, Foggy, will ye not invite me in?” Lady Marci fluttered up onto the windowsill and squawked down at him scoldingly. Matt twitched. “Is that a chicken?”

“That’s Marci. You woke her up.”

Matt slapped a hand over his face and blasphemed. Foggy fought not to laugh. This was probably not the way the romantic moonlit serenade was supposed to go, but to Foggy, there was nothing wrong in all the wide world.

Once, as a child, Foggy had let a butterfly perch on his finger and he had watched it rubbing its little forelimbs together before fluttering off to whatever butterfly business it had to attend to, and had felt touched by some magic or an incredible blessing. He felt like that now, because Matt (unreliable, heroic, promise-breaking, yearned-for) had alighted upon the home that Foggy had made for him.

The long years Foggy had waited, some days he felt they had pulled his heart out of shape and all his love, his hopes, his promises were mangled, imperfect things that were not nearly fine enough to give away. But the boy he had fallen in love with at the age of twelve was now on his doorstep looking strong and beautiful and so _willing_ that it made Foggy’s chest hurt, and it was time to make a gift of himself, no matter how damaged he was by age and salt water.

“Matt?”

“What,” Matt said in a defeated voice.

Foggy shook his head, but he was still grinning. He still hadn’t stopped grinning around Matt.

“Would you like to come in?”


	7. Chapter 7

Matt was climbing the trellis before Foggy could yelp, "damnation, Matt, I have a door!" He vaulted the windowsill (scattering a panicked hen in the process) and twined his arms around Foggy's neck, pitching his cane away and dropping his lute with a many-stringed clang.

"Good eve, my dove," he said, and his grin was wide and rakish.

Foggy dropped his face in his hands. "I change my mind. Go back to France, I want thee not." Matt laughed breathlessly against Foggy's hair, and his hands were plucking at the back of his shirt and slipping underneath. "Oh my God, stop that," Foggy laughed, slapping ineffectually and burying his face in Matt's shoulder.

"But I've travelled so far for the delighting of thy charms. Do ye hide your face, Foggy? Tell me you've not grown shy since we last met," Matt cooed, and raked a line of shivers along Foggy's back with his nails.

"Hellfire and thrice-fucked purgatory," Foggy moaned, melting all over. Matt's arms were strong around him and holding his torso bent in a delicious backwards arch that ground their cocks together and offered up the length of his sensitive throat to the scrape of teeth and to plush, wet kisses.

"Aye, there he is," Matt groaned, tempting as a serpent and about as self-satisfied. "Filthy and wanton and sweet as a plum. And all mine."

Foggy did not lack for familiarity with Matt's jaw-dropping presumptuousness, but going down without a fight would simply not do—he would not arch his back and yield to Matt like a grateful maiden succumbing to the rescuing hero—so he planted his palms in the middle of Matt's chest and straightened his elbows with a snap, sending Matt sprawling.

"Oi!"

Foggy tied up the open collar of his shirt but he was breathing like he'd just climbed the Rosaline's rigging double-quick. "Are you hungry after your travels?" He hoped he sounded less winded than he felt. "Will you eat, sir?"

Matt's face was outraged. "What sort of a question is that?"

"Well, for one, you rumble from about the level of your belt, so perhaps you should get off your hindquarters and come be fed—"

"Oh, good idea." Matt hauled his jerkin and shirt off and pitched both to the ground, then he knelt on the floor. "Feed me up, Foggy." He licked his lips.

Foggy's dry throat clicked, and he dug his fingers into his legs to keep from marching across the chamber and burying himself in Matt's smirking mouth. He was saved from the temptation when Matt's stomach growled again, which made him grimace and Foggy laugh.

"Cease, you jester," Foggy said, dodging Matt's puckered lips to take him by the hand. "There is stew and some bread left. Come and eat."

As Foggy led him down to the hearth, Matt kissed him in the narrow stairwell, which Foggy found most agreeable, but when Matt tried to chivvy him back up the stairs to the bedchamber, Foggy laughed and flicked him in the bare stomach with his fingernail and shoved him down on the bench with a blanket around his shoulders.

Foggy stoked the fire and served up a bowl of decently-edible rabbit stew with a piece of dry bed and a mug of ale, and Matt only tried to grope him but the once, so he must have been incredibly hungry. But once Matt's spoon clattered into the empty bowl and he wiped foam from his top lip, his arms went once again around Foggy's middle.

"Here, do you take me for a serving wench," Foggy laughed, trying to climb out of Matt's lap.

"I'll take thee however you ask," Matt said, reaching under his shirt yet again and getting his hands smacked yet again. "Whenever you ask. Oh, do not deny me, Foggy," he murmured, and his palm slid over Foggy's heartbeat over and over. "Not after I have been in agonies waiting—agonies that would shame the patience of a saint."

Part of Foggy wanted to scoff at the idea of anyone but him being the one to suffer agonies of waiting, but Matt's touch was full of yearning; he was nearly shaking with it. Foggy tucked the blanket tighter around Matt's shoulders and swept a thumb over his sallow, travel-weary cheek. "When—" he bent his head and kissed Matt's upturned face, "when have I ever denied you anything?"

"Never," Matt groaned. "Yet the whole of my life has been thwarted wanting all the same."

"Aye?" Foggy gasped, rocking against the bulge in Matt's breeches. "Unroll the tale, bard."

"Since I learned what came after the innocence of childhood, sweetling," Matt slurred, unable to draw his lips away from Foggy's to speak any clearer. "Since I sailed away from you as a boy and ached in my bed and knew not why. I've needed no compass in life, Foggy, my heart has ever pointed towards you."

"Sweet words."

"True ones too, Foggy."

Foggy grinned, and pressed his lips to Matt's cheek so he could feel it. "Perhaps."

"What, do you think I'll be lying to bed thee?" Matt said hotly, but he yawned enormously in the middle of it and ruined the condemnation.

"Perhaps I should just bed _thee_." Foggy said, and pulled Matt up by the blanket.

"Jaysus, finally!"

They kissed all the way up the stairs, refusing to unclasp even when Foggy's feet went out from under him and Matt kissed the both of them across the wood floor and up the side of the bed.

Matt gripped Foggy by the thighs and hefted him up, hitching his legs around his waist and bearing him down into the bedclothes. Foggy made a sound that was shocked and hungry and shoved up for another kiss, feeling drunker and yet more clear-headed than ever in his life. His head fell back and he could feel all the locks of his body opening to the weight of Matt's insistent body on his. Suddenly, Matt yawned in his face.

"It has been a long day," he said, looking abashed.

Foggy let his legs fall with a sigh. "You have travelled far and are in need of rest."

"Nay, I'm not tired, Foggy, I promise," Matt said, but Foggy shoved him face-first into a pillow and piled the bedclothes atop him, and his protestations became moans of comfort.

With a soft smile on his face, Foggy straightened the bedclothes around Matt and tugged off his boots. A hand shot out and snagged Foggy's sleeve.

"Do ye sail on the morrow?"

"Nay," Foggy bent and touched the knot at the back of his head, waiting for a nod of permission before untying the scarlet blindfold and hanging it from the headboard. "I do not sail on the morrow. Or the day after."

"I heard no word that the Rosaline lay idle."

"She isn't. Roly has her in Bruges, last I heard."

Matt's brow wrinkled as Foggy tucked him under the bedclothes. "She sails without you?"

"Mistress Gaiman has me a year on land. I am financing and speculating with her, so I shan't starve. I remain in London."

"As ye promised," Matt said, with sleepy realization.

"As I promised."

When he smiled, the corners of Matt's eyes crinkled sleepily, and it stole Foggy's breath away briefly. "Then come to bed, my dove, and in the morning—" Matt tucked his lower lip behind his teeth and it was a smirk devil's own, full of promise and mischief.

Foggy kissed him. "Nay, I'll sleep below."

"What?"

"I have a bed in front of the fire, Matt."

"You've shared my bed before, Foggy—"

"Twas a hammock. _My_ hammock, actually."

Matt's fingers crept over his thigh. "—and you'll not be maidenly with me, will ye?"

"Only in comparison to a rogue such as you could I, a sailor, be considered the chaste one," Foggy said, as Matt's other hand tangled in his hair and drew him close.

"Exactly," Matt breathed against his lips. "Share my bed, Foggy."

"Tis my choice, Matt. I would have you respect it," Foggy said, but let Matt try to change his mind with his tongue on last time.

"Oh alright. I shall, God help me," Matt grumbled as Foggy pulled away. "But the dawn cannot come swiftly enough."

Foggy patted his shoulder. For him neither. "Good night, Matt."

As he lay on his rough pallet and stared into the hearth's glowing coals, Foggy listened to the way Matt's presence changed the entire house. His sleep-slow breathing, the creak of the bed underneath him. Tomorrow, there could be a new peg on the wall by the door for Matt's satchel. A place to lay his lute and his cane. His clothes could nestle next to Foggy's on the bench and—

Foggy smothered a sudden, giddy laugh in his pillow, heart feeling bigger than the sky, and he tucked his arms underneath himself so he didn't steal upstairs and slip under the covers where Matt was sleeping.

When he finally shut his eyes, the sky was an inky black, but he'd open them again on the pearly grey dawn of a day where Matt was not across seas but mere steps away, and he fell asleep smiling.

***

London was never quiet. Especially not in Southwark, which was outside the square mile territory that made up the City of London, and where the rules forbidding plays, and brothels, and bear-baiting, and maybe even sea-captains who fell in love with irritating balladeers—they didn't exist. But in the morning, the rabble was like the tide murmuring against the bank, and when Foggy opened his eyes, the dawn wasn't grey, but brilliant. He could hear laughter outside, traders with barrows and and girls fetching water, hawkers and porters, and all the humanity of the city fresh from sleep and perhaps, all just a bit happier for the bright blue sky.

The fire had guttered out in the night and his half-frozen feet were clumsy as he essayed the stairs. Matt, still in bed but awake, had his face turned towards the window, and the morning light pearled his skin. He sat up when he heard a tread on the floor.

"I'm cold," Foggy said, voice soft as he padded towards the bed.

Matt blinked, threw back the covers and reached for Foggy in the same movement, and then they were kissing.

"Foggy," Matt said, breathing hard. It was a question.

"Matt." It was a yes.

Matt groaned and sunk his face under Foggy's jaw, his rough hands sweeping off his clothes before tucking themselves under Foggy's neck and drawing him deeper into the bed.

"Sweetest Foggy." Matt's face was open in it's happiness and his hands roving over Foggy's skin were fearless, as if certain of their welcome. "Will you kiss me again?" Foggy did. "Will you touch me—oh." Foggy's hands were already pushing down Matt's breeches and wrapping around his cock.

"May—" Matt cleared his throat, "may I lie between your legs, Foggy?"

"Not if all you do is lie there," Foggy said, drawing up his knees. But Matt wasn't laughing, and his eyes were closed, as if enraptured, as his fingers dragged along the skin of Foggy's inner thighs and along the cleft of his rump.

"What would ye have me do instead?" Matt wondered, as he spread Foggy's thighs wide with exploring hands and then crawled between them.

Foggy had to laugh then, and he looped Matt about the neck. "Just stay a while."

Matt laughed too, and wrapped Foggy's legs tight around him and started to move. "What say ye, sweetling? Would ye consent to be courted by me?"

Foggy laid his fingertips across Matt's wide-grinning mouth. "Nay."

Matt's eyebrows drew together. "Nay?"

"Nay, I would not have thee put any time into such an aim, for it would be utterly fruitless."

"Oh." Matt's pushed up on his hands and the grin fell away. "I thought. But you—"he gestured at his own body, naked but for Foggy's bedclothes and a sheen of sweat. "Oh."

Foggy bit his lip. Then, reaching out to grasp that most beloved face, he gently bit Matt's.

"Court me not, Matt, for I was won long ago."

For a long moment, there was only the murmur of the city and the river, then Matt snorted a laugh. "That was cruel of ye," he said, shaking his head, his smile radiant. "I'm so impressed."

"You deserved it," Foggy panted, as Matt bit at his jaw and his hips pushed at Foggy's till he began scooting towards the headboard. "You deserve every cruelty, should be whipped like a dog for all the trouble you've caused me, oh Christ in heaven, _Matt_ …”

Matt stopped. "Bad?"

"Nay, never," Foggy said, still breathing hard. "But understand me," he said, when Matt brightened and leaned in again, lips-first. "I'll not be tumbled and left by dawn's light."

"Again," Matt said gravely. Foggy made a noise of agreement. Matt pulled away and sat up, scrubbing at his hair. "There will always be my work, Foggy."

"Aye, I know."

"And you haven't given up the sea entirely."

"I can't. I like eating too well."

"Then what is your wish of me?" Matt hands gestured impatiently.

Foggy wanted to catch those hands and hold them still, warm them gently with his own when they creaked in the cold. He draped himself over Matt's back, comfortingly. "Just to return. Go where you must, for as long you must. But I swear on any bible from here to Rome, I would have thee return."

"But I have! Do I not find thee over any patch of God's earth, be it sodden or dry?"

It was true enough—Matt could always find him in foreign lands and upon foreign seas. But he would not live like that forever, with Matt coming into his life and his bed like a moonbeam through a window, and then stealing back out again. "That's just—two ships, passing in the night."

"But we're together then, aren't we?"

"Aye, for a night. Or a few. I would have better than that."

Matt twisted about to his knees and took Foggy by the shoulders, holding him close and pleading with the tightness of his hands. "I have never left thee for sport, Foggy."

Foggy pressed his mouth to Matt's, sweetly. "I know."

"I promise I will always find thee. Can ye not be contented with that?"

Foggy smiled. "Nay."He laughed, because it was all so clear now. "Nay, I cannot."

"Why do you laugh?" Matt demanded. " Did I sing at the wrong window? Are you not Foggy Nelson, whom I have loved near twenty years and whom I had well thought loved me as well?"

At that, Foggy threw his arms around Matt and kissed him back down to the bedclothes. He wasn't a man of great eloquence. He could upbraid his men with vulgar creativity, and he could make his displeasure known when traders on the continent aimed to take advantage of his English unsophistication. But here, with Matt, there were no words or oaths or promises that could put voice to what he felt, and all Foggy could do to make Matt just _understand for once_ was open his arms and open his mouth and try to take Matt in as far as he could.

"You kiss like the ship is sinking," Matt gasped, when they finally broke apart.

Foggy drew up his knees again and pulled Matt's forehead to his. "Let it."

Foggy planted his hands on the small of Matt's back and pressed down as he pressed up with his hips, and Matt locked his trembling arms and made luscious, helpless noises into Foggy's mouth.

"Fairest, most lovely," Foggy whispered, tracing the rippling muscles of Matt's back and feeling the spreading wet heat between their bodies. "What would I not give to have you inside me."

Matt shivered and his breath hitched. "Now?"

"Will you last?"

Matt huffed a laugh. "Nay."

"Then later. Right now I would have you wet me all over with your pleasure."

Matt inhaled hard through his nose and squeezed his eyes tight as all the sinews of his limbs tensed. "Now?"

"What, do you wish it an order?" Foggy said. Matt blinked, and then nodded jerkily. Foggy gulped. "Make it worth my while, and I shall." Matt shivered all over and and took both their cocks in his hand, working them together until Foggy groaned aloud and wet Matt's belly all over with his seed.

"Yes, you beauty," Foggy said breathlessly, when Matt whined something desperate and wordless and buried his face against Foggy's chest. "Now." He held hard to Matt's hair as they moved together, Matt's cock rubbing over the slick skin between his thighs. "Matt, now," he ordered and kissed Matt's open mouth as his hiccups ran together into one long wail.

In the silence after, there were only shouts from the market and their loud breathing. Foggy kissed his sweaty brow and blew out a long contented breath.

"Was that a farewell?" Matt asked.

Foggy started. "Matt, you bloody idiot, no. It was welcome home."

"Huh?"

"Matt, there is firewood in the hearth, beer in the larder, and the hen will give us eggs for the morning. I have not been idle."

"I care not about the house, Foggy!"

"You should though. It's yours," Foggy said. Matt went still as a stone. "I bought it for you."

Matt's brow wrinkled and worked as though the brain beneath it was chewing the thought like a candied fig. "You seek to stop me," he choked, and his voice was a small, strangled thing. He tried to push Foggy away. "Install me in a house, keep me out of the action. You think I will stop—what I do—out of love for thee."

God's love, why were they eternally cursed to misunderstand one another? Foggy stopped Matt's hands and tried to kiss him again. "No, I don't, actually. I have not said a word about stopping your work. But when you are at leisure, where do you go?"

Matt shrugged. "Where you are," he said simply.

"And I, who cannot smell the scent of you on the trade winds, where do I go when I don't work?"

"Back to London, I suppose."

"Aye. I would have you waiting for me when I do, and—" he stopped Matt's mouth with his hand when it opened it to object in some way, and tried to calm the waves in his voice, "—and I shall be waiting for you, when _you_ do. That is what a home is, Matt, as far as it can be for people like us. You'll never need to search me out in Flanders, or in Genoa, or upon the waves sixty fathoms off the coast of Denmark. Simply come back to this house, and call my name." Foggy swept his thumb over Matt's cheek. "And if I do not answer, then I am not returned, but I am making my way with all possible haste."

A tear slipped from the corner of his eye. "A home. With thee."

Foggy smiled, and caught the tear with the back of his hand. "Aye, with me. Would you consent to it?"

"Yes Foggy," Matt cried. "Yes, a thousand times, yes, till then end of my days, yes."His hands were trembling as he clasped Foggy by the back of the neck and kissed him as though the ship really was sinking.

"Aye, that's grand," Foggy said, aiming for the brash, irritating confidence of Matt's smug voice and landing only in the vicinity of a wobbly sort of joy. He sniffled. "Now tell me you love me, sweetling."

Matt threw his head back against the headboard and laughed, and clasped Foggy's hands between his own and held them to his heart. "I have tried to tell you that more times than there are grains of sand in an hourglass."

"Nay, truly?" Foggy teased, letting Matt cover his face with kisses. "I only remember an outrageous flirt helping himself to my hammock on a cold night, and any words of that sort were ever spoken in fanciful terms."

Matt sobered then. "A hit, sir, a hit. I am pierced through. Nay, peace. I would have said it plain, Foggy, years ago. I swear I would have. But I feared you would not open the door to me—"

"You have never used a door in your life; I doubt you know how," Foggy interjected, but Matt nibbled his displeasure at the interruption against Foggy's neck.

"Thou art the dearest thing to me of God's making," Matt said, his voice intense, and his teeth travelling up Foggy's throat. "I could not risk that you would turn me out."

"And you thought that would be something I would likely do, after I let you lie next to me all night and kissed you in the morning?"

"I never ken, for you never said anything either."

"Counter-hit," Foggy conceded, and chewed his lip. "I doubted your intent. I thought you would only see me a-fluster for your amusement."

"Then you must think me an unloving man," Matt said lowly.

"Never!" Foggy pressed his lips to Matt's as if the full complicated truth could be a thing tasted and swallowed to be understood. "Never. But I'm a foul-tempered old goat, Matt, and of all the souls you've met—honestly, only a fool would think me a good choice."

"I am a fool, then," Matt said, twining his arms about Foggy's neck.

"For me."

Matt's grin was blinding, and it put tears in Foggy's eyes. "Aye. For thee."

"Then say it, Matt. Jest not. Flirt not—or try, at least—and tell me you love me."

Matt's gently kissed Foggy's eyelids, and his expression was one of peace and surety. "Foggy, I love thee."

"Oh good," Foggy breathed, heart singing. He bit his lip as Matt's serenity turned into waiting, which turned into impatience.

"Have ye nothing to say to me in return?"

When Foggy made a thinking noise, Matt sunk teeth into the skin behind his ear. "Ah! I yield, villain!" He held Matt's face and kissed Matt's savage grin. "I love thee, wickedest of rogues."

"Rogue, villain, jester...such loathsome names you prick me with, dearest Caulfat. What penitences would ye have me perform to regain thy good graces?"

Foggy made a face. "Do you remember when you left London and I bade you call me Foggy and you wept a bucket of tears?

"I remember no weeping, but I remember it."

Foggy rolled his eyes. "That is when you should have stopped calling me Caulfat."

Matt snorted against Foggy's hair. "What should I call thee then?"

"How about husband?"

Matt's smiling face seized like an iceberg. Inwardly, Foggy sighed, but sailing through storms was his specialty after all. He ducked his head and pressed on. "No priest will perform the service," he said, voice quiet. "No chapel will hold it. Perhaps no God will bless it so no heaven will take us. But whatever vow you would have of me, Matt, I make it and I'll hold it in good standing till the day I die."

Matt half-laughed, as if not able to decide if Foggy were telling a joke and if so, if it was funny, but he didn't answer. Foggy swept his fingers through Matt's hair for his attention and kissed his frown. "It's alright, Matt. I can wait. Think on it as much as you like."

"You would be married to me?"

"Aye, love. In our own way, however good we can make it."

Matt nodded, abstracted, and sat silently for a long moment. When Foggy stood and began to dress, his face folded in on itself. "I've never thought of marriage before."

"Never? Not even when being wed to Natasha?"

The dark look that passed over Matt's face was slightly better than the lost one he had worn. "She told you that, did she?"

"She said it was for expediency, and holds no stead."

"Well, tis a grace you think me not a bigamist."

Foggy rolled his eyes. "You should be so blessed as to have both the Lady Natasha _and_ me to wife."

Matt hmmed and muttered "both" to himself in an interested voice, and Foggy threw socks at him. "I hear clothes, Foggy, and I like it not. Will ye not come back to bed?" Matt caught him by the shirt tail and tugged.

"I'm hungry, Matt. Dress and come down, I'll see if her ladyship has graced us with some eggs."

They ate sitting thigh to thigh on the bench, sharing one plate of soft yellow yolk spread on bread and one mug of beer, and Foggy made a game of diverting the morsel in Matt's hand with his teeth, which made Matt chase it with his mouth.

"Did ye imagine this," Matt mused. "When you thought of me?"

"What, you eating my food and taking up all the space in my bed?" Matt flashed him an impatient expression, and Foggy snorted. "I dreamed many dreams of thee, Matt. There was a time I would have thanked God only to know that you would be safe and happy. But perhaps I succumbed to pride, because simply knowing of your safety and happiness paled in comparison to being the one who provided them."

"I need no protector," scowled Matt, but it was not an unhappy one.

"Then you are singular amongst the creatures of the earth," Foggy said patiently. "For I need one, and I would have thee protect my heart as well as you protect my life."

"Foggy, over all the lands and seas on God's earth, my home was with you. That's why I have never longed for one. Because I knew you were somewhere, and with but a small amount of cajoling—" he kissed the back of Foggy's hand, "you would let me in."

"How could you stand it, being away so often?"

"Faith," Matt said simply. "And memory. And an overabundance of fights left me little time to pine, if truth be told."

"Oh, I was happier in ignorance," Foggy said, covering his eyes.

"But you see Foggy, how could I have dared to ask God for more than that?" Matt said, taking both his hands. Of course Matt, for all his swagger and carefree charm, had never quite shaken the privations of his childhood. To this day he owned but one satchel of possessions, and Foggy had never seen him greedy for aught except for Foggy's attention.

"Why do you believe God will reward you for depriving yourself, when I offer my life and my house and my love, freely?

"Do you mean that?"

"Yes, Matt!"

"You have sworn love with one breath and forsworn it in the next, Foggy."

"Because you were being an ass!"

"I am an ass often! Will you forswear your love then?"

Foggy pushed away from the bench. Trust Matt to require tutelage in the difference between words spoken in flirtation, and the words of a wedding vow. As he paced, he could see Matt's face growing increasingly tight, so he went to one knee and pressed Matt's hand to his heart.

"I make this promise to you, Matt. For love of thee I would sail a golden girdle around the world and wrap it up as thy bauble. I would learn all the languages of man to find the best words with which to swear the permanence of my love. My love for you is like the hull of an old cutter, her timbers battered by hardship and brined in long years till she be strong enough to turn aside the blow of an axe. I know we'll never stand at the altar before God, Matt—we never could woo peaceably and we aimed straight for the most overreaching sins. But between thee and me and the sail and the waves, I swear that if you would have me, then I, Franklin Nelson, will love and cherish and keep thee as my husband till the end of time."

At the end of the speech, Foggy was choked with tears and Matt was also pressing his lips together, his eyes watery. "My sweetest love, please say something," Foggy begged.

Matt swallowed thickly and wiped his eyes. "Your name is _Franklin_?"

Foggy threw his hands up. "Oh my God."

"See?" Matt jabbed a finger in his face. "You take it back already!"

"Lucifer's minions must have raised toasts to each other when they devised a torment such as you! You are the single most vexatious man to walk the green lands of God's creation, Matthew Murdoch, and woe betide you if you so much as dare think I would not walk next to you into the mouth of hell itself because I have loved you since I was twelve, and if I must scream it every morning like a demented cockerel, I will!" Foggy yelled.

Matt blinked.

Foggy sat down hard and put his face in his hands. "Jesus Christ," he said. Lady Marci flew clumsily through the open window to squawk scoldingly at them before barrelling back out in a tumble of wings and scrabbling feet.

Matt put a tentative hand on Foggy's slumped shoulder and shook him gently. "Matt, my love, I'm sorry, I—"

Matt shook him again. "Foggy, will ye marry me?"

Foggy reared up. Matt was grinning. "I'm going to punch you so hard, even people who resemble you will feel pain!"

But Matt was reaching for him, and trying to kiss him through his smile. Foggy would have resisted but tears were also coursing down Matt's face, and so, as always, he let Matt have his way.

That evening, as the sun began to ignite the outline of rooftops with brilliant orange light, they supped half inside the house and half out, lounging in the window frame between the kitchen and the yard, dishes of stew and bread balanced on their knees and a tankard of ale on the ground by their feet. Matt was spooning Foggy's rapidly-improving attempts at cooking into his mouth with one hand while stroking Foggy's calf distractedly with the other.

When Foggy teetered and stretched down to retrieve the ale, Matt's hand became an anchor, keeping him in place while he hooked his finger around the handle of the tankard and drank. When he went to offer Matt a mouthful, he found that Matt's hand already waiting.

In the growing darkness, Matt leaned against the casement and let Foggy rest upon his chest. There seemed to be no need for words, and as the city quieted, Foggy could hear the sound of the Thames brushing along the riverbank, sweeping water and men and ships out to sea. He wrapped Matt's arms around himself a little harder. There would be a time when they parted once again; no matter what Matt promised, the call of his righteous work was as impossible to ignore as the call of the sea was for Foggy.

So part they must, and part they would. And yet. The house would stand, immovable as the land itself, to call them both back.

He reached up behind him to pull Matt's mouth to his. He'd been humming something that Foggy remembered from long ago, something about a brave sea captain and a maiden so pale.

"Foggy love, I feel you've not answered my question. Will ye be my husband or nay?"

"I asked first, Matt. Tis _thee_ who owes _me_ an answer."

Matt grinned. "I have not that in my memory, i'faith. I think you are mistaken."

"Ha, try harder, rogue. I have waited well nigh twenty years for thee, Matt. For you to admit I'm right, I can wait twenty more," Foggy laughed.

"Trust me, my dove," Matt said. "It will take much, _much_ longer than that."


	8. Epilogue

The knock came just as Foggy was pouring his morning ale, which was all he needed to know about whether it was good news or bad on the other side of the door. When he threw it open, there was a boy whose skin was the colour of the night sky, wringing his cap in his hands but gazing up at Foggy bravely.

"Good morning, Captain," the lad bowed.

"Is it, i'faith," Foggy croaked, and sipped his ale.

"Is Master Murdoch awake?" the lad asked cheerfully, and Foggy choked. Matt was indeed awake, and stuffing clothing into a satchel hurriedly, as he'd been too intent on athletically tumbling Foggy to pack the previous night. But that was not something this strange young man was ever to know.

"Who?" Foggy coughed.

"Matthew Murdoch, who is known as the blind balladeer," the lad said, and his eyes sparkled with admiration.

Foggy gestured with his mug. "Try down by the tavern, my lad, they rent rooms."

"No, sir," the lad said, still smiling, "I was given very clear instructions to collect him at this house. Where the heather grows." He looked pointedly at window, where six months ago Foggy had plucked heather from the field outside the cottage he had rented all those years ago, and planted it in a box so that Matt might finally have the smell of it in the city.

From above, there was suddenly a strangled shriek and a thump, one that Foggy could easily identify as a certain orange-haired husband falling on his hindquarters in shock.

"What was that?" the lad asked.

Foggy knocked back the ale. "Would you believe me if I said it was the chicken?"

"If he does," a voice made Foggy turn. Walking down the stairs from the bedchamber, the hem of her dress gathered up in one hand and an apple in the other, was the Lady Natasha. "I would be most disappointed."

He stared at her. "How did you get into my house? Did you climb the trellis? Have all spies forsworn doors?"

"Yes. There is an oath," she said, and smirked as Foggy huffed a laugh and kissed her hand. "This is my apprentice, Captain Nelson. Miles Morales, of Morocco."

"Sir," Miles bowed low.

"Master Morales." Foggy bowed back.

"Foggy, where is my lute?" Matt called from above.

Foggy pinched the bridge of his nose. "Under the bed, Matt," he called back.

"I have no gloves!"

"In your cloak, Matt!" Morales hid a smile behind his hand. "Could I convince you to reclaim your wifely rights?" Foggy sighed.

"He is no more my husband than he is the husband of this lad here," Natasha sniffed, indicating Miles, who startled. "I shall love him always, but not so much I won't wallop him for his foolishness."

"Foggy, I'm borrowing your coin purse! The one with the silk lining!"

"Nay, that's mine, you have your own!" Foggy yelled. Then he cleared his throat and flapped a hand at the hearth, where there was porridge bubbling in the pot. "Natasha, please—break your fast and the lad's, if thou hast not. I must—" he made a helpless gesture.

"Set your fool of a husband straight?" Natasha dimpled.

"Aye," he sighed and took off for the stairs. "Matt, you villain, put down my—" In the bedchamber, Matt was perched on the bed with his blindfold in his lap and his lute and satchel on the floor. "—purse."

Matt held up his own coin purse, a gift from Foggy. It was fragrant leather, still stiff and new, tooled with vines and rubbed till it nearly shone red. "I would never take yours. How else would I find thee again?"

"Then what was that all about?"

"You were bartering me back to Natasha!"

"Nay, I could not unload you." Foggy said drily. Matt scowled. "Oi, settle yourself, madman. You are my husband, not hers. No matter what. I will not waver on this."

Matt held out a hand and pulled Foggy in for a kiss. "I fear I'll be lonely for thee, my dove."

"As will I, Matt."

"Three months, Lord Fury thinks. No more."

Foggy picked up the blindfold and tied it around Matt's head before cupping his face and pressing their lips together sweetly. "Three months or thirty, Matt, I will see thee in our home again."

Below the bedchamber, the door opened without even a knock.

"Caulfat!" Roland's voice made Matt snort into the kiss. "The tide waits not even for newlyweds!"

"Fucking hellfire," Foggy sighed, kissed Matt one last time, and shouldered his own bag.

At the bottom of the stairs, Roland and Greville were eating porridge while a fair-haired lad, about fourteen, stood warily in the corner. Foggy snorted when he saw that his men had left a great deal of space between themselves and Lady Natasha, who was sipping ale and smirking.

"Is the ship properly provisioned, gentlemen?" Foggy asked, shoving his satchel at the lad, who was fine-boned and, for some reason, blushing. At the table, hiding behind a tankard, young Master Morales was also blushing.

"Aye." Greville waved his spoon.

"Then why, pray tell, are you eating my breakfast?"

Roland smiled blithely and beckoned for the young sailor. "Captain, meet our newest. Your name, young sir."

The lad swept off his cap and bowed. "Stacy, Sir. Gwyn Stacy."

"Right." Foggy said, drawing out the word. "Master Stacy, you have the look of one too delicate for the sea. Think you stalwart enough to sail the rough, cold waters for months at a time?"

"I ask only for the chance to prove it to you and all who would doubt," he said in a firm, Welsh voice.

Foggy smirked. "Very good." He flipped a coin at him. "Fetch yourself a meal, young sir. We'll be a moment."

"Aye, Captain," Gwyn bowed again and slipped out.

"He looks like a girl." Foggy said heavily.

"Uh, Foggy, he _is_ a—" Matt started. Everyone—Roland, Greville, Foggy, and even Natasha—cleared their throats threateningly until Matt stopped, face confused.

"Half the bucket boys on the Rosaline are easily mistaken for girls, but only by those who ignore their wit and fortitude, and they that do also ignore how much their captain would ensure that his crew come to no harm at all." Foggy said, meaningfully. Matt tipped his head and said no more.

"Wait, Master Stacy is a—" Miles piped up, his eyes darting from one sailor to another. Grenville nodded. "Lady Natasha, please excuse me." Natasha inclined her head, porridge spoon still in her mouth, and Miles shot out the door.

"That's adorable," Greville said.

"A spy and a sailor?" Matt said, "Nothing good will come of that."

Natasha snorted, and it was a huge, flatulent noise. " _Bozhe moi_ , was that me?"

"Aye, your daintyship." Foggy chuckled, and picked up his satchel. "Come, friends, leave the pot; Mistress Boone will care for the house in our absence. The sea awaits."

On the way to the dock, Natasha held Foggy's arm and told him stories of her adventures, while Foggy squinted at her and tried to sort the half-truths from outright lies. Next to them, Matt had his arm slung around a grinning Greville while they both argued with Roly, who was walking before them, backwards, and gesturing wildly. Several paces behind, heavy satchels on their backs, Miles and Gwyn weaved and bumped into each other, and when they did, their smiles were like secret flowers unfurling.

The ship that was to ferry the raucous blind troubadour, the deadly Muscovite woman, and the small, clever-eyed Moorish lad to whatever clandestine activity they meant to undertake was berthed next to the Rosaline. She was a galleon of vast size, tightly-rigged and handsome, and Foggy suppressed a pang of envy at her gleaming timbers. She was a golden apple that made the Rosaline look like a squashed raisin.

"That's your ship?" Roly burst out.

Matt shrugged. Natasha smirked. "I called in a favour."

"From whom?"

"The King of Norway."

Foggy shaded his eyes and espied an great virile beast of a captain at the galleon's wheel, broad and grinning, with long locks that shone as gold as the sun itself. The smirking, dark-eyed beauty of a first mate wasn't bad to look at either. "Oh my," Foggy murmured, heart quickening when the captain caught his gaze and winked.

Matt brushed aside Foggy's hair and whispered in his ear. "We have been wed not even a twelve-month, and your eye wanders already?"

"I was looking at the topsail," Foggy said haughtily. Matt burst out laughing.

"Alright, some of us still must work for a living," Roly said. He and Greville bowed farewells to their party, but when Roly went to whistle for Gwyn, Greville clapped a hand over his mouth.

"Give the boy a moment, Sir," he cajoled. Gwyn and Miles only had eyes for each other, and hidden in the folds of their cloaks, their hands were clasped.

Roly rolled his eyes, but then tugged his cap and with Greville marched up the Rosaline's gangplank, the pair of them shouting orders one after the other like two tongues that shared the same mind.

"Farewell, Captain," Natasha curtsied low.

"Until the tide brings us together again, Lady Bird," Foggy bowed. Natasha smirked and kissed him on both cheeks, and then faded into the crowd.

"Well," Matt said, wringing the handle of his cane. His face was pinched awkwardly with something Foggy had not ever seen before. "Foggy, sweetling…"

"Do not lead Natasha into foolishness," Foggy said, his voice hoarse and brusque, as he straightened Matt's jerkin. "Set a good example for the lad."

"What makes you think Natasha can be led anywhere?" Matt smirked, stilling Foggy's anxious hands. "Tis ever I tripping after her into trouble. Come now, my dove." Matt said, clearing his throat of tears a little and flashing that wide devil's grin. "Give us a smile and wish me fair weather."

Foggy shook his head, huffing a disbelieving laugh, but he threw his arms around Matt and squeezed him tight. "Come home to me, wickedest of rogues."

"If not in this life, then in the next, husband. I swear it," Matt said fervently. "But you must promise not to join Neptune's court either."

"I won't drown," Foggy said, face pressed to Matt's throat. "Kiss me but once more and Neptune will know me a married man and truly spoken for."

Laughing quietly, Matt took Foggy's face in his hands and kissed him on the corner of the mouth. "Till we meet again, my love."

With one last brilliant smile, Matt pulled away and hallooed for Master Morales, looping the apprentice spy about the neck and dragging him away from young Gwyn Stacy with promises that three months would pass in the blink of an eye. And if Matt's voice was wistful, and wishful, Foggy minded not at all.

Wiping the corner of his eyes but finding himself smiling, Foggy looked up at the rigging of his beautiful ship and shouted for his newest sailor. In a twinkle, young Master Stacy was at his side.

"Aye, Captain?" he said. He was bent a little crooked under the weight of Foggy's satchel but he had steady bright eyes and a determined face. "Ready when you are."

"Alright, my lad." Foggy said to Gwyn, as they boarded the ship. "Let's get you acquainted with the sea."

_Exeunt_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sailing with me, sweet readers. 
> 
> Comments are life-bringing and without them I probably wouldn't have finished writing this. 
> 
> If you have liked this sort of malarky, I can be found here: http://werelibrarian.tumblr.com/


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